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LETTER DATE
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When I finished reading Mr. Joseph McGee's long-winded epistle in today's (February 19) Free Press, I thought, "Huh, another good man gone wrong." Mr. McGee has apparently let his emotions run away with his common sense.
The sterilization law is not an experiment in eugenics to produce a "super-race," as he seems to think. It is an attempt to curtail the propogation of the feeble-minded and criminal, so that fewer children will be born handicapped mentally and physically.
A sound mind in a sound body does not make a "super-man" it is but the rightful heritage of every child. The "intellectuals" who are endeavoring to have the sterilization law passed in this state realize that; they are not so self-locked in the dark pr esent that they cannot see into the immediate future. They are not so smugly stupid to assign the responsibility for the way in which the feeble-minded and vicious-minded use their faculties, to God. They are aware that those who cannot think for themselv es must have others to think for them.
Nor do these "intellectuals" desire to "usurp control over our bodies, that they may experiment on them." It isn't vivisection that is performed, you know.
Every citizen of voting age is responsible for the feeble-minded and the criminal. We are more responsible for the way in which they use their faculties than they are. Therefore, it is not only the state's right to take control of their bodies in the e xtent of making them sterile, it is the State's duty!
Now for the last paragraph of Mr. McGee's letter which I should like to answer with counter statements:
1. Sterilization is not a punitive measure but a humane one and should be within the jurisdiction of the state.
2. There are many sane, urgent, and vital reasons to permit the State to make this bill a law.
3. The law will probably be abused by an unscrupulous few--all laws are. But they don't stop passing laws on that account.
The laws of nature, which everyone speaks so glibly about, is a complex ship that needs a rational captain else it founders and runs amuk. So you good citizens, who can see the present clearly enough to envision the unconceived race of mental and physi cal defectives surely to come if some stringent measure is not put into effect at once, it is your duty to help place a captain aboard by seeing that the sterilization bill becomes a law.
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