Obama Gives Radical Feminist Steinem Medal of Freedom

President Obama said that Gloria Steinem “changed how women thought about themselves.” He also labeled her a “game-changer,” a “disrupter,” and a “champion noticer.”

Obama stated, “She’s alert to all the ways, large and small, that women had been and, in some cases, continue to be treated unfairly just because they’re women… because of her work, across America and around the world, more women are afforded the respect and opportunities that they deserve.”

Obama did not mention Steinem’s disdain for heterosexual relationships (Steinem infamously remarked that “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”), marriage and childbearing (“you become a semi-non-person when you get married”), her love for abortion (on her own abortion: “I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life”), her advocacy for confusing gender boundaries for children (“We’ve begun to raise daughters like sons…but few have the courage to raise our sons more like daughters”), and sexual promiscuity (“A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after”).

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.

On Margaret Sanger, the Soviets, and Democrats

Townhall.com ^ | April 15, 2011 | Paul Kengor

Posted on Friday, April 15, 2011 10:54:29 AM by Kaslin
“[W]e could well take example from Russia,” advised Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, “where birth control instruction is part of the regular welfare service of the government.”

Sanger, racial-eugenicist who spoke to a 1926 KKK rally, whose work included a “Negro Project,” who wished to rid America of “human weeds” and “morons” and “imbeciles,” and who wanted birth control for “race improvement,” had just returned from a pilgrimage to Stalin’s Russia. Like many progressives (click here for John Dewey’s experiences), she went there to soak in the alleged triumphs of the communist motherland, marveling at Lenin’s and Stalin’s advancements for women.

And so, in the June 1935 edition of her publication, Birth Control Review, in an article titled, “Birth Control in Russia,” Sanger concluded:

Theoretically, there are no obstacles to birth control in Russia. It is accepted … on the grounds of health and human right…. [W]e could well take example from Russia, where there are no legal restrictions, no religious condemnation, and where birth control instruction is part of the regular welfare service of the government.

I could quote more, including this jaw-dropping prediction: “All the officials with whom I discussed the matter stated that as soon as the economic and social plans of Soviet Russia are realized, neither abortions nor contraception will be necessary or desired. A functioning Communistic society will assure the happiness of every child, and will assume the full responsibility for its welfare and education.”

Now there, ladies and gentleman, is progressive utopianism, an absolute faith in central planners. Contrary to the Planned Parenthood matron’s optimism, abortions skyrocketed to seven million annually in the USSR.

What struck me in recently re-reading this article is how Democrats in America have arrived at Sanger’s ideal, where Planned Parenthood’s services have become, in their mind, “part of the regular welfare service of the government”—just like Stalinist Russia.

Consider the revealing response by Democrats to completely legitimate Republican attempts—amid record deficits and debt levels—to cut taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood:
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) vowed: “The dangerous, ideological cuts to Planned Parenthood … are never, never, never going to pass the Senate.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Republicans had placed a “bull’s eye on women in America,” barring them from “health services they need.”

“The real reason that the right-wing extremists in Congress orchestrated this outrageous government shutdown,” added Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO), “is to try and defund Planned Parenthood as part of their ideological assault on women’s health care.”

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) explained, “This is a war on women. They’re trying to inject their politics and their religion into local family planning.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) insisted that defunding efforts were “nothing more than an opportunity for the right wing in the House to sock it to women.”
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called it a “very dangerous situation” for women. Pelosi told reporters: “It’s degrading to women.”
And Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) described Republican efforts as a “vendetta” against women, insisting, “Behind each of these Republican proposed cuts, there are thousands, maybe millions of people who would be hurt.”
Remember when liberals called for civility?

And remember, too, when President Obama referred to “tax cuts for the wealthy” as the Republicans’ “Holy Grail?” Well, taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood appears to be the Democrats’ Holy Grail. As Obama and Republican Speaker John Boehner battled over a budget compromise, Obama drew a line in the sand on Planned Parenthood, snapping: “Nope. Zero. John, this is it.”

The room fell silent. Obama had hoisted the Holy Grail.
You’d think from Democrats’ reaction that taxpayer funding of the nation’s largest abortion provider was Article 1 of the Constitution, an inalienable right in the Declaration, a sacred political covenant with taxpayers, anchored in the writings of Jefferson and Madison and Locke and Adams, etched in cement at the base of the Washington Monument.

It’s preposterous that America has run so far aground that we even seriously entertain directing taxpayer dollars to the nation’s largest abortion provider. The “right” to an abortion had to be read into the Constitution, at the exclusion of sections (the 14th Amendment) guaranteeing a right to life. Abortion was read into the “right to privacy,” three words which don’t exist in the Constitution.

It took Democrats a while to get there, but, finally, almost a century after the start of the Bolshevik Revolution and Margaret Sanger’s organization, they’ve arrived at where the Soviets and Sanger found common ground. They indeed act as if, as Sanger said about Stalin’s Russia, “birth control … is part of the regular service of the government.”

The saddest thing is that neither they, nor their supporters, nor America, seem to comprehend the outrageousness of their position.

Obama gives abortion champion Gloria Steinem Medal of Freedom Award

by Rob Schwarzwalder

Thu Nov 21, 2013

Among those who have just received the Medal of Freedom from President Obama is Gloria Steinem, who has done as much for advancing abortion-on-demand as any single person in the last half century.

In an interview with The Washington Post, she said, “Approximately one in three women in this country needs an abortion at some time in her life”. Aside from the dubiousness of this statistic, note that she uses the term “needs.”

Needs? Laura Enriquez has written convincingly on abortion as a preferential, not medically necessary, condition. What is clear is that what passes for “need” in the world of Ms. Steinem is actually the desire of a woman in a difficult or inconvenient situation to end a pregnancy.

This is not to say that women make such decisions lightly. Rather, human nature (male and female) being what it is, if a legal option is presented by which one can alleviate something hard, it defies the experience of recorded history that most people will not take it. The roughly 55 million unborn children aborted since 1973 within the 50 states are a grim but irrefutable evidence of that claim.

Here is what Steinem has said about the abortion she had 57 years ago:

It [abortion] is supposed to make us a bad person. But I must say, I never felt that. I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty. But I never could! I think the person who said: “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament” was right. Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn’t going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life, and therefore it felt positive. But still, I didn’t tell anyone. Because I knew that out there it wasn’t [positive].

Consider her almost unspeakably painful assertion, that “taking responsibility for (one’s) own life” includes taking a life that is not your own. Commentary about such a proposition would be superfluous.

Ms. Steinem has received our nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom. Yet she remains trapped in her own blindness, a state in which there is no freedom whatever. Christians should pray that in her waning years, she would come to know the true freedom that a forgiving and loving Savior alone can offer.

A Plan for Peace

by MARGARET SANGER

The following (A Plan for Peace, Margaret Sanger) was published in Birth Control Review (April 1932, pp. 107-108):

First, put into action President Wilson’s fourteen points, upon which terms Germany and Austria surrendered to the Allies in 1918.

Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population, the directors representing the various branches of science: this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of individuals. The main objects of the Population Congress would be:
a. to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population.

b. to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11 per thousand.

c. to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.

d. to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

e. to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.

f. to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.

g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.
The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics.

The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct.

Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense-—defending the unborn against their own disabilities.

The third step would be to give special attention to the mothers’ health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxic goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs their health are placed under public health nurses to instruct them in practical, scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives-—thus reducing maternal mortality.

The above steps may seem to place emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, but I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace.

With the future citizen safeguarded from hereditary taints, with five million mental and moral degenerates segregated, with ten million women and ten million children receiving adequate care, we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace.

There would then be a definite effort to make population increase slowly and at a specified rate, in order to accommodate and adjust increasing numbers to the best social and economic system.

In the meantime we should organize and join an International League of Low Birth Rate Nations to secure and maintain World Peace.

Summary of address before the New History Society, January 17th, New York City

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.