On the morning of October 19, 1927, the Commonwealth of Virginia sterilized Carrie Buck. Dr. John Bell — whose name would forever be linked with Carrie’s in the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell — cut her open and removed a section from each of her Fallopian tubes. In his notes, Dr. Bell noted that “this was the first case operated on under the sterilization law.”
Carrie Buck was an average, unassuming girl who grew up around Charlottesville. She wasn’t very smart, but she wasn’t dumb either. She didn’t come from the best circumstances, but she did the best with what she had. Pictures show a plain young woman with short, dark hair, bobbed in the fashion of the time. In one photo, taken by Arthur Estabrook, an “expert” in eugenics whose testimony would help seal her fate, Carrie sits on a bench with her mother Emma at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded, where both were institutionalized.
Estabrook’s photo of Carrie and Emma was taken on November 17th, 1924, the day before Carrie’s trial began. Estabrook had come to visit Carrie and Emma at the urging of Dr. Albert Priddy, the superintendent of the Virginia Colony. Priddy was building a case against Carrie, a case for her forced sterilization, and he needed a purported expert in the “science” of “inferior genetics” — a.k.a. eugenics — to testify that Carrie, her mother, and Carrie’s six-month-old daughter Vivian were all congenitally and irredeemably “feeble-minded.”I didn/t much like Bill Maher for his anti-vaxx stance, I really don't like him for this,,,
In a different time, Estabrook, with his neatly parted hair and defined features, could have become a well-known character actor, a face “in all those movies.” But Estabrook was employee at the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and he was more than prepared to testify to the inferiority of Carrie and her bloodline. Most of his life had been devoted to diagnosing and describing “defective bloodlines” that, in his view, held humanity back. At the urging of Aubrey Strode, the lawyer for Dr. Priddy and the Virginia State Colony, Estabrook rushed down to Lynchburg to testify against Carrie. Strode believed that the testimony of a true expert in eugenics would be crucial to developing an unassailable legal record proving that Carrie, Emma, and Vivian all carried defective genes and, therefore, that the state had both the authority and the right to sterilize Carrie to prevent any further “feeble-minded” offspring. He needed such expert testimony if the appellate courts, and possibly even the U.S. Supreme Court, were going to uphold Carrie’s sterilization and thus ratify not only Dr. Priddy’s plans for the mass sterilization of “genetic defectives,” but also the plans of thousands of similar eugenicists around the country. Eugenics was Estabrook’s life work, so of course he came as quickly as he could.
Bill Maher Just Promoted The Unproven Goat Milk HIV Therapy That Charlie Sheen Got In Mexico
On Friday night, comedian Bill Maher had a controversial guest on his show: Samir Chachoua, an Australian doctor who practices in Mexico. Earlier this month, Charlie Sheen went on The Dr. Oz Show and described going to Mexico to get Chachoua’s unproven HIV treatment, injections he developed after studying the milk of goats with arthritis.
Doctors and HIV/AIDS experts are shocked that Maher would promote such a dubious medical treatment to his HBO show’s audience of 4 million people.Better to Let Kids Play in Traffic Than Let Them Skip Church, Christian Blogger Writes
“I was absolutely flabbergasted,” Mark Harrington, executive director of Treatment Action Group, a New York-based HIV advocacy organization, told BuzzFeed News. “To promote a quack on his show, it’s very irresponsible and can only be described as tabloid journalism at its worst.”
“This kind of high profile pumping of alternative medicine stories linked to celebrities can harm other people by persuading them to do damaging things that affect their health,” John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, told BuzzFeed News.
“This is a classic example of false hope syndrome,” Moore added. “People are persuaded to do wacky stuff that stops them from doing the right stuff.”
It’s not a secret that many Christians are terrified of letting their kids make up their own minds about the question of God.
It’s not a secret that many seem to feel, instinctively, that without constant, repetitive drilling of faith concepts into their kids’ heads from the earliest possible age, they will not believe. In effect, they’re saying that the argument for God is not persuasive enough on the basis of reason, evidence, and logic, but must instead be force-fed to children from infancy before they develop a way to ask questions or form a rebuttal.
Or, as the Bible puts it, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
And while this is, I’m happy to report, not strictly true (certainly not exclusively, as myself and many other former believers can attest), it’s a pretty deeply entrenched concept all the same. To do anything less than indoctrinate kids as soon you can is to risk their soul — because children left to examine the evidence and arguments for religion on their own are children who may reject it. By not passing along your faith, you’re avoiding your greatest duty as a parent: preserving your children’s souls. In short, reason, evidence, and freethought be damned when souls are on the line.
It’s bad enough on its own, and it certainly reflects poorly on the perceived strength of religious arguments. But then you find parents justifying this bad idea with a full-on embrace, taking it to conclusions that are so much worse.
Parents like Christian blogger James Uglum, who recently wrote a piece describing why letting children skip church is a monstrous thing. Worse, in fact, than letting them play in rush-hour traffic.
Phil Robertson: 'Rid The Earth Of' Gay Marriage Supporters
While stumping in Iowa for Ted Cruz on Sunday, “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson declared that gay marriage is a sign of growing “depravity” and “perversion” in America.Texas pastor begs God to smite UFC fighter ‘with a lightning bolt’ because he threatened to punch Jesus
Robertson, notorious for his racist and anti-gay remarks, said of marriage equality: “It is evil, it’s wicked, it’s sinful and they want us to swallow it.”
“We have to run this bunch out of Washington D.C.,” Robertson said. “We have to rid the earth of them. Get them out of there.”
Cruz followed Robertson on stage, calling the reality TV star “a joyful, cheerful, unapologetic voice of truth.”
Pastor Donnie Romero of the Stedfast Baptist Church in Texas has asked God to smite a UFC fighter who said that he would be willing to throw a punch at Jesus Christ.
During a December interview with TMZ, MMA fighter Conor McGregor bragged that not even the Son of God could defeat him in the octagon.
“There’s not a man alive that could beat me,” McGregor explained. “But Jesus isn’t alive so maybe he could come back from the dead, I don’t know. I’d still whoop his ass.”
That didn’t sit well with Pastor Romero, who revealed during a sermon last week that he would be praying for God to strike down McGregor.
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