Eugenics Isn't Going To Get Us Out Of This Mess
The economy must be a hungry god. Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, believes grandparents will sacrifice themselves for it. At the Federalist, a writer wondered if social distancing had gone a bit too far, had denied the god his rightful due. “It seems harsh to ask whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die,” he admitted. “Yet honestly facing reality is not callous, and refusing even to consider whether the present response constitutes an even greater evil than the one it intends to mitigate would be cowardly.” Rusty Reno, the editor of First Things, a conservative Christian journal, decried the “demonic side to the sentimentalism of saving lives at any cost.” Society requires triage, Reno suggested, not as a last resort, but as a preemptive measure. Some people are too expensive to save.
Within the conservative establishment, the economy has other willing priests. Economist Stephen Moore recently told the Washington Post that public health officials, while “vital,” had perhaps become too rigid. “You can’t have a policy that says we’re going to save every human life at any cost, no matter how many trillions of dollars you’re talking about,” he said. We’re “going to have to make some difficult tradeoffs,” Larry Kudlow, the director of President Trump’s National Economic Council, warned on Fox. Some even offered themselves up as tribute. Jesse Kelly, a professional Twitter user and occasional pundit, said he would “happily die” to save his beloved country from another Great Depression.
But no one is asking Jesse Kelly to die. They’re asking it of your grandparents, and of your neighbor with cancer; they ask it of me and of you, too, if your body is flawed or simply unlucky. The views expressed by Patrick and Reno and Moore, and by the Federalist’s various agitprop artists, are eugenics. They separate human life into categories. In one box, there are people worth saving. In the other, there are people we ought to let die. Believing this makes them eugenicists. What they contemplate is not quite mass murder, but a sort of planned, negligent homicide. Patrick doesn’t want to build gas chambers. He just wants to let nature take its course. The fit will survive the cull.
Conservatives are inordinately fond of calling people eugenicists. For years, they’ve applied the label to the pro-choice movement. The reasoning tends to gallop. Abortion is murder, ergo, parents who terminate a pregnancy because of fetal defects or disability participate in a eugenicist exercise. In this way, conservatives turn people with disabilities into useful props. The conservative can point at a child, turn on the tears, and scold you for wanting to murder him in the womb. It’s a cheap trick, notable mostly for shock value. I am not as sick as some, and not as handy an object lesson. Nevertheless, I have long understood that my value to the right ended when I left my mother’s body. For many conservatives, a fetus is the ultimate blank slate. Its value is determined by others; it cannot contradict them, or put forward its own ideas. It can’t ask to be treated a particular way or stray from God’s light. Best of all, it requires nothing from anyone but a womb. People, by contrast, are cumbersome. They make demands, have wills of their own. And alas for the priests of small government, people are expensive, especially if they need regular medical care.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/eugenics-isn-t-going-to-get-us-out-of-this-mess/ar-BB11Giee?ocid=msn360
= new reply since forum marked as read
