“Margaret Sanger belonged to a group of leftists who were also associated with the creation of the American Civil Liberties Union. The most prominent figure in this radical circle was Emma Goldman, known as ‘Red Emma.’ Goldman was a revolutionary who had plotted with her lover to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company. The plot failed, and she was deported to the Soviet Union. In her own mind, Sanger, too, was a revolutionary, openly proclaiming that birth control was the means by which she intended to change the world. In March 1914, Sanger launched a monthly newspaper, the Woman Rebel, which promoted not only contraception but moral and political anarchy. The paper’s motto was ‘No gods, no masters!’ In a 1930 profile of Sanger in The New Yorker, writer Helena Huntington Smith noted that the Woman Rebel mixed its birth-control propaganda with a good deal of red-flag-waving, and perorations of the ‘Workers of the World, Arise!’ variety. She printed rousing contributions entitled ‘A Defense of Assassination’ and ‘The Song of the Bomb,’ and composed an editorial declaring: ‘Even if dynamite were to serve no other purpose than to call forth the spirit of revolutionary solidarity and loyalty, it would prove its great value.’ Her 1920 book, Woman and the New Race, was a manifesto of her revolutionary program to change the world. Margaret Sanger belonged to the company of self-appointed social redeemers. A eugenicist, she believed that the world’s problems—poverty, hunger, war—stemmed from the ‘fit’ having too few children and the ‘unfit’ having too many. The ‘unfit’ were people of the lower classes and races she regarded as inferior. The disastrous situation that uncontrolled births created could be remedied, she believed, if people could be bred like animals with an eye to improving the species. Sanger believed that salvation lay in ‘liberating’ women by endowing them with ‘reproductive freedom’. She wrote, ‘Even as birth control is the means by which woman attains basic freedom, so it is the means by which she must and will uproot the evil she has wrought through her submission.’ She based the title of her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization on the notion that birth control is the pivot or turning point by which civilization can move from barbarism and disaster to future rationality and well-being. Such delusional world-transforming ambitions lie at the heart of every radical cause and fuel the extremist energies and beliefs. ‘Reproductive freedom’—with its implications of world-transforming consequences—is still the rallying cry of the women’s movement Sanger inspired.” David Horowitz’s Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, 2018 Comments are closed.
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