When evolutionary ethics reigned unchallenged: Don’t gab a lot about cute guys in North Carolina ….
In light of historian Richard Weikart’s survey of the effects of evolutionary ethics vs. the traditional kind, this might be a good idea to recall something that happened in North Carolina, in the days when no one challenged the evolutionary ethics administered by social workers, into the 1960s:
But what we do know is that the five bureaucrats who were on the board in the 1950s — the peak period for eugenics in North Carolina — didn’t drive around the state plucking people off the street for sterilization. They had middlemen doing the leg work, picking candidates and summarizing their lives into terse paragraphs with just enough unsavory detail to make a case.
One girl sterilized by the board is described in her file as “often away from home” and “constantly talks about boyfriends.” She was 12.
The middlemen volunteering these girls and women for sterilization were typically social workers, making North Carolina stand out in the history of eugenics laws.
– Julie Rose, “A Brutal Chapter In North Carolina’s Eugenics Past,” NPR
And, of course, in consequence of these efforts, 75% of all Nobel Prize winners come from North Carolina, right? Oh wait, this just in ….
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