You may have heard about the overtly racist fellow who will represent Republicans in a Tennessee congressional race. He was the only one on their primary ballot. When the Repubs belatedly realized who he is they made an effort to help a write-in candidate win instead.
The racist, James L. Hart, won in a landslide with 83% of the vote. I doubt that many voters sympathized with his views, they were just woefully uninformed, like voters everywhere.
Via Zomby, this article from Newsday:
An unabashed racist will represent the Republican party in the November election for a congressional seat after a write-in candidate failed to derail his effort.
With 86 percent of the primary vote counted Thursday, write-in candidate Dennis Bertrand had just 1,554 votes compared to 7,671, or 83 percent, for James L. Hart, a believer in the discredited, phony science of eugenics.
In November, the GOP candidate will oppose Rep. John Tanner, a Democrat who has represented the northwest Tennessee district for 15 years.
Hart, 60, vows if elected to work toward keeping "less favored races" from reproducing or immigrating to the United States. In campaign literature, Hart contends that "poverty genes" threaten to turn the United States into "one big Detroit."
Emphasis mine. What difference does it make if eugenics is valid science or not? The problem isn't that it doesn't work, I don't care if it does or not. The problem is that implementing eugenics as public policy results in horiffic human rights abuses.
The reason you would care about the validity of eugenics as a science is if you think human rights should be sacrificed for the good of society. We do this as a matter of public policy in many ways, such as income redistribution programs or drug prohibitions, both of which are abusive to the rights of individuals.
The only clear case against eugenics is made in terms of ethics. If your ethics are muddled so much that you believe people should be forced to sacrifice for the good of society, then you have to care whether eugenics is phony science or not. I don't care.
Posted by Walter at August 6, 2004 06:09 PM