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"Many people if not most are willing to approve or do some morally repugnant or evil thing to some innocent person who never hurt them, in the name of some favorite principle. For example, the Tuskegee Experiment, where poor black men with syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama, were offered “free health care” but left untreated so the Doctor(s) involved could study the progression of the disease. Then there was the Eugenic Sterilization Law of North Carolina, where poor women, especially blacks, were sterilized after the second birth out of wedlock, as means to restrict the numbers of both welfare babies and black children.
There is our own military’s concept of “acceptable collateral damage” in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. During the war in Viet Nam, a woman where I lived stated that it was good to kill Vietnamese babies because they would just grow up to kill our soldiers. The U.S. Calvary did just that with Native American babies at Wounded Knee. The Irish Sisters of the Magdalene Order enslaved about 30,000 young girls who were raped, illegitimate, orphaned, pregnant out of wedlock, or just simple-minded, in chastisement for their “sins”. The girls’ families often agreed.
The last place I worked in Stillwater, a couple of coworkers would get together and mutter imprecations about homosexuals until the air turned black and blue. I don’t think they could tell the difference between homosexuals and child molesters. There are any number of liberals who want to throw in jail anyone who disagrees with their gun control politics. There are court decisions all the way up to the Supreme Court that left innocent people languishing in jails or on death row because of some technical objection to accepting new evidence and letting them go.
And the list goes on.
What if there was some way to tell if a woman was at a higher than normal risk of birthing a child with either Down’s Syndrome or a child likely to die of SIDS. Now suppose that Oklahoma passes a law stating that this woman can be denounced by her doctor and forced by court order to have her tubes tied until she agrees to abort any unborn child that could be shown to be likely to experience either Down’s or SIDS. In other words, until she proves that she is in no danger of having and raising that kind of child, and thus “inflicting” it on the rest of society. The old Spartans, after all, were said to kill any baby that wasn’t perfect. The White Power skinheads might like it, but I think that most decent people on both the right and the left would agree that such a law would be evil and morally repugnant.
I say that there’s not much moral difference between that kind of law and the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, by which anyone with a mental illness can be denounced, even by just hearsay, and sent off to the local loony bin, without any full and impartial investigation by local authorities. And kept there until that person can prove the negative, that he or she is not a danger, to mental health “professionals” who have nothing but their own prejudices and self-interest to decide who is and is not a danger. "
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