Plus, She’s a Girl
What happens when you combine Louie Gohmert and Ted Cruz? A four legged, half brained, tiny winkie that tests the limits of sanity.
Ted and Louie want a bust of Margaret Sanger removed from the National Portrait Gallery because they just learned that bust does not always mean ta-tas.
“There is no ambiguity in what Margaret Sanger’s bust represents: hatred, racism, and the destruction of unborn life,” Cruz said. “Not only should we continue efforts to redirect funds from Planned Parenthood, an organization founded by Sanger that is currently under criminal investigation, we must also work to ensure that her inhumane life’s work is in no way promoted.”
Seriously, guys? That’s the only constructive thing you have to do today? Somebody get them a rake or a boom or something so their time can be better spent.
Thanks to Alacrity Fitzhugh for the heads up.
The forced birthers are at it again. “unborn life” … the religious wrong live to create oxymorons. Then again, what should we expect from the morons who jump into the swamp and think they’ve come out reborn.
1The undynamic duo is desperate for media attention and financial support for Crazy Cruz’ floundering campaign. This is their cynical ploy for both. Unfortunately, that seems to be all the right needs to hear in order to cough up the bucks.
2Those two are accusing someone else of hatred and racism?
3Might as well face it, Margaret Sanger was an uppity woman.
4I think I’d get them a “broom” instead of a “boom” (your spelling). They might hurt themselves if they got a big boom.
5JJ, you probably meant “broom” but I’d like to give them each a nice big boom, and not in the financial or voting support sense.
6Face it they would use the rake to take turns stepping on it.
7Words fail me. It just seems that Texas has degraded to the point that guys like Cruz and Ghomert, who it seems could not earn an honest living, get a hand out by being elected to national office. But I don’t want them a Mickey D’s taking work from folks that deserve it. So what do ya do? As a progressive society we need to support those who are unable to support themselves. As opposed to throwing them into a chasm in Mount Taygetus.
8currently under a partisan witch hunt. Jason Chaffetz has said he could find no violations o9f the law in Planned Parenthood. Every state that has investigated PP has found no violations. Therefore the violations must be wingnut fantasies,as per usual.
9Is it only me, or does anyone else see a resemblance between the bust of Margaret Sanger, and the photo of Phyllis Schlafly in the other article on the page? Talk about polar opposites!
10Tsk, Tsk, they should be reminded that gradpappy Bush , aka Pescot, was one of the early supporters of Planed Parenthood. That should make their heads explode.
11Yes, but Carol, he was also a supporter of Nazis, wasn’t he?
12Looks like he was covering his bets.
Practically all my life I have remembered Sanger as the lady who took on the nose in the air folks who didn’t want women using birth control. She ran a clinic and helped poor women in all sorts of ways. The article today also mentioned that she was in favor of using birth control to control minority births. I don’t know, but I figure any choices women had back then had to have been an improvement. She is one of my heroes. And I am distressed that we are now in a position that people who are too young to remember what it was like when women had no birth control, are against it. AGAINST BIRTH CONTROL. Aaarrrgghhh.
13The poster children for the need for birth control.
14@Gramiam you could say he was the first Hedge Fund manager.
15I guess with the idiot twins, it’s o.k. to build monuments in D.C. to guys who owned slaves (Jefferson… Washington, etc,) but the very small tribute, to a very great lady….. has to go????
Oh crap.
16It is significant that the far right whackadoos who are against birth control and family planning, citing it’s a plot to limit minority births, are the same ones who troll the internet about how the minorities are having more babies than they can afford.
17For two guys so in love with the sound of their own voices, Cruz and Gohmert have discovered arguing with a bust is the ideal way to keep talking, and talking, and talking…
18Hey, you oughta hear how they abhor the Girl Scouts! Seriously! Dincha know that the GS were promoting birth control and such?
When I heard that I got our my photo album of all the girls in the troop I volunteered with and laughed myself silly!
19Sanger is similar to PP. About 3% of her(or less) had anything to do with eugenics,just as 3% or less of PP is about abortion. Unfortunately,wingnuts are fixated with small percentages-think the 1% of wealth and property who get the undivided attention of America’s largess and the 3% of Pp get the undivided attention of America’s large asses.
20If I believed in saints, Margaret would be one.
21It’s guys like these and their ignorant comments that got me to set up an automatic monthly contribution to Planned Parenthood a couple months ago. They just don’t have a clue.
22I believe this is a repetition, but think about it. Cruz is against birth control? He has a wife and two children. Hmmm. Or maybe he’s not against birth control, but against poor people having it. Y’all send him some dust rags and tell him he needs to go around the hallways in Washington and dust off all the famous busts and see which one he can find who met his idea of perfect.
23Who made them aware of this bust of Margaret Sanger I wonder? I seriously doubt they figured it out by themselves. Someone must have given them topic when they announced they needed a new hissy fit reason 🙂
24Margaret Sanger’s biography is very interesting. She was trained as a nurse and worked in the slums (of NYC, I think). Visit after visit to some wretched apartment occupied by a sick worn-out mother, a crowd of kids, and an over-worked father. She wrote about a desperate woman asking the doctor if there wasn’t something to prevent pregnancy. In Sanger’s presence the doctor laughed, and replied, “Sleep with your feet in a bucket.” Sanger was aware of the much lower birthrate in France and decided to go to Europe and find out why. It’s a great read.
25In a discussion of having a woman’s image on the face of a $20 (or whatever) bill, there were African American women who very much did not want Margaret Sanger to be chosen because they consider her extremely racist. I suspect if you have been the target, and your grandmother or great-grandmother was getting the message that she, being of an inferior race, shouldn’t have children, that “3% of her” that was racist looms a lot larger.
It’s not just wingnuts. It’s people who’ve been hurt. Birth control and euthanasia are still very hot buttons with people of color because they know there are white people who would like them to die young and childless. In a medical ethics article in the NEJM, on how different cultures see end-of-life decisions, the author pointed out that African Americans resist “giving up” because they’ve been denied care, and essentially pushed over the edge as useless, worthless, etc. so often. If they hadn’t developed a “cling to life with every fingernail” approach, many more would have died.
And by the way, don’t try the “but nobody’s perfect–she did a lot of good things” argument in a situation like that. The blowback will be fierce.
(Yes, I’m in some interesting conversations elsewhere.)
26The law of unintended consequences. Thanks to Cruz and Loopy Louie, I went to Wikipedia and read about Margaret Sanger, who I basically knew nothing about. I don’t agree with everything I read there, but I see this battle has been going on for a hundred years, and she was a leader and fighter in the front lines. Nothing has changed for some of these mental midgets. They are still fighting the same battle with the same blind hatred for women having control over their own bodies. Quite eyeopening.
27Oh, yeah, and thanks Old Mayfly for the little nudge that got me curious about her.
28@Marge Wood, It’s a point in Cruz’s favor to have only two children. (Though none would be better for the gene pool.) A few presidential elections ago, I saw a bio profile chart of all the aspirants at the time. None of the Dems had more than two kids, and none of the GOPs had fewer than three, and often quite a few more. It was scary. As H.L. Mencken cried, probably in another context, “The sons of bitches are gaining on us!” But then they don’t think overpopulation or climate change are any kind of real problems…..
@Elizabeth Moon, I see what you’re saying about perceptions of Sanger’s racism. But surely not all of those poor women begging to find out how not to have more kids they couldn’t feed were white Anglo-Saxons, and the same is true today. It’s a damn shame that nasty attitudes of the past, and present, can get in the way of women who need help.
29Rhea, I agree on what you said about Sanger. Just saying that sometimes we have to shut up and listen and let people get the anger out at injuries done to their families…and hope that a generation or two down the line (if we’re now treating their descendants better) they’ll be able to see that everyone is complex, and people can be really rotten on one side and really great on the other.
One of my favorite lines is from Solzhenitsyn: “The line between good and evil runs right down the middle of every human heart.”
30@e platypus onion:
Last year, I read “An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics” by Sharon M. Leon. The book mentions Sanger in passing. What I did learn from the book is that eugenics, at the time, was not particularly controversial and was more kind of conventional wisdom — who doesn’t want healthy, smart kids? The Catholic Church largely agreed with the goals of the movement and some American Catholics were prominent leaders in the movement. However, the Church began to separate from the movement over the issues of birth control and forced sterilization.
What I’m trying to say is that Sanger, based on what I read in this book, was not really outside of the mainstream on the issue of eugenics at the time. Or, for that matter on birth control, given Prescott Bush’s support for and role in Sanger’s group that preceded PP. (As I recall from reading about him on Wikipedia; I should go read about Sanger, as AKLynne has done, because I also don’t know that much about her.)
On an unrelated note, earlier this year I read “Maids, Wives, Widows: Exploring Early Modern Women’s Lives 1540-1714” by Sara Read. It was interesting to learn that it used to be common belief that women couldn’t get pregnant if raped. 500 years later, people like the infamous Todd Akin still believe so. For some people, it’s as if there have been no advances in knowledge and medicine in all these centuries.
31Theo, long ago when I was way much younger and single I read a biography of Sanger and was favorably impressed. Along about the same time span I read some stuff on how women were treated as individuals in England and the colonies and it was not at all good. They were constant victims of totally nasty sermons in the church, whichever religion it was. Big question then: how is it that any man would want to consort with such a creature? Well, they were given a pass for purposes of procreation and even beating their wives. As much as genius flows down the ages, so does stupid. Whenever you hear jerks like Akin mouth off, you also just have to wonder if they beat their wives? Can’t understand why no one has publicly questioned them on that issue.
32Now that the feline is out of the tote regarding the real motive behind the destruction of PP (it lets wimmin folk enjoy consequence – read pregnancy – fun sexy time) we must also erase the concept of women’s struggle for physical autonomy. We must make Margaret Sanger and those like her unpeople.
33Theolib- 1927 Scotus decision in Buck v Bell case (to affirm forced sterilazation). Of the justices (10) , 8 were dedicated wingnuts. Of the 2 Dems one dissented. All wingnuts voted affirmation.
Damn eugenics loving libs,huh DD?
I posted this over at Dakota Free Press awhile back when a dedicated wingnut was blaming all eugenics on Sanger and Democrats. Eugenics was the mainstream for a short period and Sanger visited it,but soon departed and went on to discover birth control for women. She fled to Europe because she was under indictment in America for espousing birth control.
34There is no ambiguity in what Ted Cruz and Louie Gohmert represent: hatred, racism, and misogyny.
35So, I’m familiar with Sanger, but hadn’t heard the eugenics part. Did she ever advocate forced, involuntary sterilization? If so, not good.
But back to the original Texas Terrible Twosome; notice how Teddy slipped in an allegation that Planned Parenthood is currently under “criminal investigation”? Does he mean something other than that hamfisted Congressional committee, which just blew up in Jason Chaffetz’es face?
36As I understand it, the whole minority birth control thing was more about giving poor minority women choices and therefore chances in life. It was not about destruction of their race, but about giving women a chance to improve their life
37All Margaret Sanger wanted to do was to help all women have the ability to plan when they wanted to have their children. As it was said in an earlier comment, she reacted to the doctor’s advice to have the woman sleep with her feet in a bucket of cold water if she wanted to avoid further babies. The story I heard was that the doctor advised her have her husband sleep on the roof at all times. In her time, the wealthy families didn’t have a lot children since the wife and husband sleep in separate rooms and basely, keep to separate lives at all times. Margaret Sanger had the normal racial prejudices of her time and in this day, we shouldn’t be shocked to read some of her comments.
38Wingnuts argue Democrats are aborting minority babies at higher levels than whites because Democrats really hate minorities and wingnuts love them. Wingnuts aren’t interested in facts or history. Eugenics with forced sterilization was an idea for a short period of time accepted by both major political parties.
Margaret Sanger should be remembered as a Saint by women and understanding husbands everywhere regardless of political views or religion.
39Goody. Cruz and Gohmert want to make the National Portrait Gallery as partisan as the textbooks selected by the Texas State Board of Education.
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