NC to recommend money for sterilization victims

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.pekintimes.com/newsnow/x2079019779/NC-to-recommend-money-for-sterilization-victims

By By MARTHA WAGGONER
The Associated Press
Posted Jan 10, 2012 @ 06:00 AM

RALEIGH, N.C. — It’s a question that has not been answered before and doesn’t have an easy solution: How do you repay people for taking away their ability to have children?

North Carolina’s Eugenics Compensation Task Force is the first in the nation to tackle that question and is set on Tuesday to recommend how much to pay victims of forced sterilization, along with whether the victims’ descendants are eligible for the money.

“If we all agree that there is no amount that restore somebody’s loss of ability to procreate, then it’s understood that the ultimate figure is an attempt to put out an active apology instead of a verbal apology,” said task force member Demetrius Worley Berry, a Greensboro attorney. “This is not an attempt to compensate, repair or restore what happened years ago.”

State officials sterilized more than 7,600 people in North Carolina from 1929 to 1974 under eugenics programs, which at the time were aimed at creating a better society by weeding out people such as criminals and mentally disabled people considered undesirable.

[Lance_Boyle]

1. I disagree with NC taxpayers being asked to foot the bill for this.

I have never advocated the forced sterilization of anyone, and I resent being expected to pay as if I had. I was not of voting age when the sterilization policies were in effect, and I resent being expected to pay as if I had been. As if a handful of dollars is going to change or even begin to make up for the fact of forced sterilization anyway? This entire idea is ridiculous. I sincerely hope the state government resists this idea from the task force. Truth and reconciliation is one thing. Extorting funds from people who weren't even involved to make some token feel-good gesture at retributive justice is another thing entirely, and quite wrong.

By the same token, when can we expect a task force on slavery to insist that NC residents pay reparations to the families of former slaves? Surely that heinous crime deserves reparations equally as much as the eugenics program? And there must be other evils committed by the State in earlier times that deserve reparations, too. This retroactive retribution slope is starting to get slippery...

[BlueIris]

2. “This is not an attempt to compensate, repair or restore what happened years ago.”

Good, because nothing will.

[Lance_Boyle]

3. Then what is the intent?

This idea punishes current NC taxpayers and residents for actions taken by the State long before many of us were born, much less of voting age or of age to participate in the government's decision making on the matter. And to what end? To provide an avowedly inadequate token of apology? Isn't that a bit like flicking a penny out your car window at the pedestrian you ran over?

I could get behind this effort on one condition: that the funding for any such retributive reparation be made strictly voluntary in precisely the same manner that contributions to Federal election funds are... via ticking a checkbox on State tax returns. Anyone who feels guilt for the State's unethical past actions would have the ability to contribute towards righting that wrong (even though it is impossible to right). Anyone who bears no culpability and is secure in that fact can opt out.

[BlueIris]

4. That's what I'm wondering. Don't misunderstand, the victims should at least be compensated.

I think. It is the bare minimum and the least the state can (and should) do. But it won't make what the state did any better, which is something we should also recognize.

[Lance_Boyle]

5. The question to me is... compensated *how* ?

Clearly paying them isn't adequate. A State apology isn't adequate. So what is? I think the LEAST the task force could have done is to query any surviving victims of the eugenics program to ask them what might constitute adequate restitution. Did the task force do that? Honestly, anyone responsible in the least little bit for the program has been forcibly sterilized by nature itself by now, so that retributive angle is out. Has nobody bothered to ask "what do the actual victims want?" My guess is that not many of them outright say "MONEY!" My guess is that not very many of them would refuse it, either, if offered. Nevertheless, that does not make it my responsibility to pay them for a crime (loaded metaphorical term - the State's eugenics program was certainly not illegal when it was carried out) I did not commit.

[NNN0LHI]

6. Doesn't your state pay financial claims in other situations that you personally didn't commit?

When someone wins a false arrest or police brutality suit against a police department in your state do you feel the settlement should not be paid to the person because you personally had nothing to do with it?

I am trying to see if you would feel this way in every case or for this one specifically?

Don

[Lance_Boyle]

7. This is not a lawsuit, individual or class-action.

I admit I would have less of a problem with this if it was a matter decided by a jury of my peers in a court of law. But this is not that.

[jwirr]

8. One state out of all of them. This was nationwide.