Irony. Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood addressed the KKK but the Obama Administration says that Catholics who defend marriage are like racists.

In another entry I posted about Archbp. Dolan’s letter to Pres. Obama warning him and his administration to back off from their project to equate those who defend true marriage with racists, as if the proponents of same-sex unions held the moral equivalent of black people seeking equality in the early 1960’s.

Even as I posted that, I found an email urging me to post about the time the founder of Planned Parenthood – supported enthusiastically by the Obama Administration – addressed the Klu Klux Klan.  Yes, Margaret Sanger was an ally of the KKK.

I can’t help but wonder at how tone deaf the White House is about racism.  I suppose they depend on general ignorance of the origins of Planned Parenthood and its virulent agenda.

The email I received just had some quotes about Margaret Sanger and the KKK but no references.  You can find some more information about this HERE.  I am sure readers have more on this.  Sanger gives her own account of the event with the KKK in her own words in The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger (Reprint – Dover Publications, 2004, pp. 366-367).

Here is what I received in the email:

Prolife leaders are asking that the first week of October be set aside to recall the fact that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, spoke at Ku Klux Klan rally. As stated in her autobiography:

“I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan…I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses…I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak…In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.”

85 years after the Planned Parenthood foundress spoke at the KKK rally Planned Parenthood:

  • *A black baby is three times more likely to be murdered in the womb than a white baby.
  • *Twice as many African-Americans have died from abortion than have died from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined.
  • *Every three days, more African-Americans are killed by abortion than have been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in its entire history.
  • *Planned Parenthood operates the nation’s largest chain of abortion clinics and almost 80 percent of its facilities are located in minority neighborhoods.
  • *About 13 percent of American women are black, but they submit to over 35 percent of the abortions.

In this Youtube video you hear Sanger’s own account read from her aforementioned autobigraphy. It is machine generated reading, similar to what you would hear with the Kindle text-to-voice option.  Not perfect but not bad.

[wp_youtube]6Fj-E-Yk78M[/wp_youtube]

The Obama Administration supports an organization founded in part to eradicate black people, Planned Parenthood (HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE).

AND….

The Obama Administration is pushing a policy that anyone (the Catholic Church and others) who support true marriage are similar to racists. (HERE)

It’s all rather like a Salvador Dali painting in which clocks are melting off the edges of tables.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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18 Comments

  1. Gail F says:

    I don’t think this argument makes much difference to people who aren’t pro-life. PP supporters may like Sanger in the abstract, but I don’t think they know or care much about her actual life, and the typical response I hear to such KKK stuff is “that was a long time ago and PP is nothing like that now.” People today have pretty much forgotten the eugenics movement, which was HUGE, and the complicated history of the KKK, which at one time was extremely popular in the United States and a potent political force — it was not seen as the insane fringe movement it is today. The political power of the KKK was ended, not by people getting fed up with it, but by a sex scandal. My impression of most PP supporters is that they are pragmatists. They don’t care much about history or subtlety, they think abortion is a quick and obvious solution to unwanted children being born.

  2. shane says:

    Progressives have a history of flirtation with social darwinism. It would not at all be wrong to discern racist undertones in the propaganda for birth control in the third world. The celebrated Paul Blanshard also criticised the Church for baptizing mentally handicapped children.

  3. Jack Hughes says:

    The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;

    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know

    That twenty centuries of stony sleep

    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  4. Supertradmum says:

    The Obama agenda is completely out of touch with reality. Decisions and policies are not made from a rational stance of anti-racism or pro-life, or even political acumen. The individuals in the Obama circle are only doing what they do for their own egos, their own post-modernist individualistic stand of making themselves the center of power in the world.

    Margaret Sanger was a similarly sick person-either a personality disorder of Narcissism or a completely ego-centrism caused her to think that the world revolved around her world view–similar to ,”Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven”. As in Milton, where Satan is depicted as totally a creature of charism and pride, Margaret Sanger and the present leader of our country continually ignore Natural Law Philosophy, substituting it for “I will not serve.” When leaders step out of the natural order created by God in His Wisdom, only evil and folly follow. The connection between KKK and Sanger was not only that they were white supremacists, but that they wanted the world to be made in their own image and likeness-that of evil.

  5. mike cliffson says:

    Rest of western christendom, all sameylikey.What staggers me is how many people not only believe, but want to believe, lies.

  6. BLB Oregon says:

    As one person put it, it is as if the ships were running aground right and left so that people were afraid to go to sea at all, but instead of inquiring into what needs to change in the shipyard, people decided to it was more appropriate to question what it means to be a “ship” in the first place, and whether it wouldn’t be more just to say that ship and a house are the same thing, and let every house be called a ship and every homeowner, a captain.

    It might be merely surreal, excepting that we need a sound shipping fleet to survive.

  7. BLB Oregon says:

    Thank you for the Yeats, Jack Hughes! Perfect.

  8. Jucken says:

    Darwinism, spiritism, nazism and marxism are really birds of a feather. From the flock of eugenics. And their common weapon is birth control.

    Barack Obama is like Adolf Hitler: a mongrel that hates half of his ancestry. Obama isn’t really black, just as Hitler wasn’t really “white” (that is, what he called white).

  9. AnAmericanMother says:

    Jucken,
    While somebody testified at the Nuremberg Trials that Hitler’s grandfather was Jewish, that turned out to be untrue, at least as recounted. Supposedly his grandmother was in domestic service in Graz in the house of a wealthy Jewish family named Frankenberger, was seduced by the son of the house, and Hitler’s father was the result. But there was no such family in Graz at the time, and indeed there were no Jews in Graz because they had been expelled and didn’t return until well after Hitler’s father was born. I’ve also read that an itinerant Jewish trader may have been his father . . . but who knows.
    Some have posited that Hitler went to a great deal of trouble to conceal his ancestry not because he had a Jewish grandfather but because he had a lot of insane and feeble-minded relatives (not surprising in an isolated and somewhat inbred population). Illegitimacy was very common in the area, and there are several candidates for the unenviable position of Hitler’s grandfather, but nothing is certain as Maria Schiklgruber refused to identify Alois’s father.
    But regardless, Hitler’s paternal grandfather was unknown and was never identified by his grandmother. So he was unable to provide the “certificate of racial purity” that he required of all his subjects. So I guess he was, after all, a mongrel.

  10. bookworm says:

    Gail pretty much hit the nail on the head. The KKK was at its peak of political influence in the 1920s and dominated a number of state governments. It was also just as much (if not more) anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant as it was anti-black in those days. They presented themselves as defenders of the family and true American values against hordes of foreigners who professed loyalty to a “foreign potentate” (the pope). The KKK was behind the infamous Oregon school law (struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1925) that attempted to outlaw non-public schools.

    Also, eugenics in the 1920s was still regarded as a legitimate science and a possible means of eliminating many human ills. If it worked on plants and animals, why not on humans? It had not yet obtained the stigma associated with Hitler’s attempt to create a “master race.”

    While I am no fan whatsoever of Margaret Sanger, I believe the claim that she wanted to exterminate the black race MAY be false or at least exaggerated and shouldn’t be relied upon by pro-lifers to try to “convert” people to their cause. The infamous letter in which she described a plan to sell birth control to black clergy and told her associates to make sure “word didn’t get out that we want to eliminate the Negro race” or something to that effect, is probably more accurately interpreted to mean that she was concerned about a false PERCEPTION of her movement among blacks. In other words, she didn’t really want to “eliminate the Negro race” but was worried that it might come off looking that way in the black community. There are many, many valid points of criticism regarding how Planned Parenthood operates today, without resorting to attempts at reading the mind of a woman who has been dead for 45 years.

  11. bookworm says:

    And somewhat off topic but VERY good news… the Illinois Department of Public Health has shut down the infamous Rockford IL abortion clinic for numerous health and safety violations:

    http://prolifecorner.com/node/921

  12. tealady24 says:

    What idiot rhetoric we have created for ourselves in the “modern” age!!!
    Pro-life! Who ISN’T in favor of being alive????
    Why we can’t have true discussions about what abortion is really all about, and why there are no TV commercials showing everyone exactly what it is (and don’t give me this drivel about “it’s too violent — on TV??? pluease!), maybe the rest of society would pull its heads out of you know where and wake up!
    Then again, probably not.

  13. benedetta says:

    bookworm, Actually there is a lot of evidence that the very same line of thought of Sanger is consistently at work, then straight through to now. It may take on numerous appearances, as you point out, in order to “win over” adherents to its case. It even sells as good and able to bring about peace. Just because one could become convinced of certain effects or results one desires does not make it truly objective, inherent, good, for anyone. When you strip away the rhetoric and the nice intentions, yesterday, today, tomorrow, the culture of death remains one and the same. To eugenicists and those who believe in it (and it is ugly), it preaches, did preach and still does preach (and publish in academia in the social sciences and various forms) eugenics. To those who want to soft pedal it and happily support it not for one’s own high moral standard but for the “other” who could countenance, it preaches not to impose one’s values on another. To those who think there are too many children it preaches the myth of overpopulation. To all it preaches soulless utilitarianism. To those who care for the poor it will flatter and to those who want more capitalist consumption through marketing and convenience and stuff it validates and feels your pain. The one thing it never preaches is the Gospel.

  14. benedetta says:

    Speaking of professional trollery of course racism is at work as always. Eugenics has just dressed up in enlightened garb. Remember years ago getting into an animated discussion about the immorality of the abortion culture with an acquaintance who lectured me in very racist terms about its necessity. He paused and then cheerfully confided that his mother ran a clinic. I was appalled then and remain so. Suffice to say, no matter how popular the “we must have it” insistence and no matter how disparaged “prolifers”, the argument in favor of lots of abortion especially regarding people he targeted in his argument (and it was wholly secular, in terms of civil society, faith in God never was raised as an issue at any time) was to me totally unconvincing. He essentially also said that it would be better to have more abortion than to expand the safety net of public welfare. Barf.

  15. cpaulitz says:

    Here’s my post on Rorate on the anniversary of her death. Did you know she was Catholic and her mother conceived 18 children? Ironic, no?

    A troubling anniversary …

    Margaret Sanger, one of 11 children born to devout Roman Catholics, who later became a racist evangelist of abortion-on-demand and led countless souls to Hell, died on this day in 1966.

    While there is no need to recount her disgusting history of eugenics, nor her rabid racism, the effects of her terror still ring true on the corner of many ghettos, where there are nearly as many black children aborted every year as there are born in America.

    Sanger, who came from a mother who faithfully conceived 18 children, would spend her life both preventing the conception of and murdering countless already conceived children.

    How much now we must pray, on this day especially, that our Lady closes the doors to every Planned Parenthood slaughterhouse and then maybe — just maybe — America can again claim to have the moral high ground in the world we lost so long ago with the help of Margaret Sanger.

  16. James Joseph says:

    Father,

    There are many videos on the YouTube covering Margaret Sanger’s ‘Negro Project’
    Also noteworthy is the lengthy ‘Maafa 21’ documentary (…a presentation my old friends who were normal before moving to Northampton, Massachusetts to live around UMass Amherst tell me is a sham and then reliably move into a diatribe against the journalist Jame O’Keefe)

    -Like a good old GKC sans Belloc, it seems I haven’t a single Catholic friend.

  17. Tony Layne says:

    I remember, back in the ’80s and ’90s when affirmative action was still the hot topic, that much of the language used by college liberals effectively encoded the same stereotypes as used by racists, but giving them a positive “spin”. For instance, it wasn’t that black people were too uneducated to understand big words … it was that white people were too prolix and obfuscating (or some similar terms that were equally polysyllabic).

    The liberals were able to ignore Sanger’s racism because they had a much better-sounding, more “inclusive” reason for targeting minorities: having all those babies keeps minority women poor and downtrodden. Therefore, abortion enhancestheir socioeconomic mobility! And therefore we are racist because we want to keep them socially dependent, second-class citizens!

    Sick, twisted, perverse reasoning … if “reasoning” we can call it.

  18. Alan Aversa says:

    Margaret Sanger was virulently anti-Catholic. She attacked the Catholic Church, Pope Pius XI, and his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii (On Chaste Marriages), calling

    the Catholic doctrine […] illogical, not in accord with science, and definitely against social welfare and race improvement. (source)

    Keep praying. Join your local 40 Days for Life. This is a very real spiritual battle. Pray that we stop funding abortions through Planned Parenthood

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