Perfectly Awful (cont.)

A Holy Crusade

"The fact that it was possible in 1910 for Alexander Graham Bell to be on the board of the Eugenics Records Office along with Thomas Hunt Morgan, the first man to win the Nobel Prize for Genetics, shows how seductive the movement was," says Lombardo. "It's seductive to engineer a world in which you could wipe out crime, poverty and disease, and you could find all kinds of contrary political movements working towards this one same goal. The American Eugenics Society ran a eugenics sermon contest in the 1930s to encourage religious leaders to speak out for eugenics in their congregations and got sermons from almost every denomination including Jews."

Every denomination except the Catholic Church, that is. Numerous documents and letters in the Gosney collection refer to his contempt of Catholic officials blocking his efforts. The resounding battle between the church and organizations like the HBF stemmed from the church's complete and total defense of "natural laws" in issues of human sexuality, according to Dr. James J. Walter, the Austin & Ann O'Malley Professor of Bioethics at Loyola Marymount University.

"The first thing the church had against eugenics is that it would violate the dignity of the individual when the movement viewed some people as less than equal with other people. There was a disposition in the eugenics movement to view some as worth less than others," said Walter. "Sterilizing them destroys their ability to have children, and for the Catholic Church that violated natural laws because it separates the lovemaking and procreating ability for this individual with no benefit to the individual being sterilized."

Another nail in the coffin of the eugenics movement came from the heartbreaking case of Buck v. Bell, a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court case that was the only Supreme Court case in which a state eugenics law was challenged and upheld. The case concerned the state of Virginia's desire to sterilize a woman named Carrie Buck under its eugenic sterilization law.

Buck had an out-of-wedlock daughter and she, her mother, and her child were all accused of being feebleminded. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. ruled against Buck's rights to avoid sterilization in one of the most criticized and shameful rulings in American legal history. He closed his argument by saying "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

The tragedy of the case is the very reason Paul Lombardo has devoted his life to fighting against the prospect of eugenics coming back into prominence. After writing a graduate school paper on the case, he managed to meet Carrie Buck while he attended law school.

"I was the last person to interview her before she died, then I found her school records and her daughter's school records," said Lombardo. "An alleged imbecile, Carrie turned out to be an average student and her daughter was on the honor roll. The Supreme Court case was the basis for at least a dozen state laws on sterilization, and it was all a sham. Another tragic fact is that Carrie's baby was taken from her at the moment of delivery and she never saw her again."

One way in which survivors of the sterilization programs have been able to fight back is through the court system. For instance, in Alberta, Canada, a class action lawsuit was filed by 2000 survivors of the Canadian sterilization program, and Dr. Alexander Tymchuk, a UCLA professor of medical psychology, was called in as an expert witness on the plaintiffs' behalf.

"They had IQ assessments that identified these people as mentally deficient, but remember that a lot of these people didn't speak English and the tests were in English. Or they were physically disabled, and the IQ test required you to manipulate things as part of the test. So a lot failed miserably."

The tide has been turning in the favor of eugenics victims lately: The class-action suit settled favorably for the victims, and several U.S. states have issued official proclamations apologizing for the eugenic sins of the past. In California, state Sen. Dede Alpert (D-San Diego) hosted hearings in the state assembly in 2003 that provoked then-Governor Gray Davis to issue an immediate apology from the state in regards to all forced sterilizations.

But even those steps are not enough to protect the future completely.

Lombardo returned to the faculty at the University of Virginia in the early 1990s and started following the Human Genome Project, which was an international scientific study that mapped every gene in the human body over a 12-year period from 1990 to 2002. He fears that the project, although approved by even the Catholic Church for its primary goals and techniques, could give rise again to prejudicial eugenic attitudes.

"We're not as advanced and noble as we like to think we are. There's nothing wrong with mapping the genes, but it depends what we'll use that information for."

"Eugenics can come back again. The reason is that the very procedure we use to cure genetic illnesses, transferring new gene sequences into DNA, is the same way you can transfer sequences to enhance the individual or their offspring," says Loyola's Walter. "The Catholic Church had no problem with finding the knowledge, but is concerned with the implication that parents can wind up designing their children.

"We know that we can alter them and improve on those genetic sequences, making them taller, smarter, have better memory, faster - and then we're likely to repeat the prejudices common in society because everyone has their own views of what makes a good human being."

And Lombardo fears that the times are potentially ripe for a resurgence in eugenics.

"For people who say this could never happen again, I guess I wonder if they thought American citizens could be locked up and told they couldn't see a lawyer," says Lombardo, referring to some of the Patriot Act's most nefarious aspects. "I think a time of national fear and a time when there's a lot of social dislocation and particularly a time of drastic economic downturn is when people propose radical solutions to social problems and look for scapegoats.

"That's when the few in the radical fringe of eugenics are the most successful. I don't think it's going to happen again tomorrow or even next week, but I totally don't agree that it's not possible for eugenics to come back someday."

Just weeks ago, on August 5, self-professed racist James L. Hart won the GOP primary for a U.S. Congressional seat from the 8th District of Tennessee with 83 percent of the vote.

His platform, according to an Associated Press article, is stark and direct: He wants to keep "less favored races" from reproducing or immigrating to the United States, and in his campaign literature contends that "poverty genes" threaten to turn the United States into "one big Detroit."

Perhaps most surprising: Hart himself admitted he never expected to win the vote and was stunned to find that no one mounted an organized opposition to his candidacy.

Carl Kozlowski is a regular Arriviste contributor and the co-author of the satirical self-help guide Life: The Final Frontier. (Pick this up!) He has also performed standup coast to coast and written for the Chicago Tribune, New City Weekly in Chicago, Chicago Reader and Pasadena Weekly.