Advocating eugenics
"I wish we had a Siberia so we could ship them all off to freeze to death and die and clean up the population."-New Hampshire State Senator Martin Harty, who is of course a member of the Republican Party, on how government could best serve, in his words, "the mentally ill, the retarded, people with physical disabilities and drug addictions-the defective people society would be better off without." Quoted on Shakesville. More information can be found here: http://thinkprogress.org/?p=149958
I really, really hope I don't have to explain to anyone what is wrong with this picture, or why this mindset is genuinely evil. But I will if necessary. Let me be plain. If we are alive we have a right to remain so until our natural deaths. There are no "defective people," not even Martin Harty. There are, however, defective beliefs, for example: "People who are different from me, or who have different needs than me, or who face different challenges than I do, don't deserve to live."
Sometimes I feel like Sokka, trying to convince the villagers not to listen to the fortune-teller. But this isn't comical - it's life and death. And attitudes like this are behind a large portion of the politics of cutting the budget, and of denying health care to large numbers of Americans. If this were truly about balancing the budget, cuts would occur evenly across the board, and not most deeply into the areas of spending that least impact the deficit.
As a country, we really need to say, "We all are human beings, we are all equal, and we all have a right to survive."
I really, really hope I don't have to explain to anyone what is wrong with this picture, or why this mindset is genuinely evil. But I will if necessary. Let me be plain. If we are alive we have a right to remain so until our natural deaths. There are no "defective people," not even Martin Harty. There are, however, defective beliefs, for example: "People who are different from me, or who have different needs than me, or who face different challenges than I do, don't deserve to live."
Sometimes I feel like Sokka, trying to convince the villagers not to listen to the fortune-teller. But this isn't comical - it's life and death. And attitudes like this are behind a large portion of the politics of cutting the budget, and of denying health care to large numbers of Americans. If this were truly about balancing the budget, cuts would occur evenly across the board, and not most deeply into the areas of spending that least impact the deficit.
As a country, we really need to say, "We all are human beings, we are all equal, and we all have a right to survive."