Is There a Liberal “War on Equality”?

In a Washington Post column, former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson takes on claims that the administration has engaged in a “war on science.” He asserts that, “for the most part, these accusations are a political ploy.” Considering his qualifying phrase it seems that some of them are not ploys. Disappointingly, Gerson does not tell us which ones. Instead, he makes a careless historical argument to support his claim that liberalism threatens human equality.

Gerson’s only example to this effect is the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gerson is right that important progressives of that era favored eugenic theory, and he is correct that sterilization was an important and shameful part of eugenic social policy. Having established a paradigm case of misguided liberalism, Gerson identifies the “new eugenics” of genetic screening, in vitro fertilization and abortion. In this paradigm, the real war is not conservatism versus science but the continuing war of liberalism versus human equality.

The old eugenics movement has become a favorite of conservative commentary, but the commentators in question seem not to know more than the bumper sticker history. In fact, both progressives and conservatives favored eugenics; the most vigorous critics of eugenics were themselves progressives; and after World War II conservatives (who detested FDR and the New Deal) were distressed at the bad odor their movement had come under in the wake of Hitler’s murderous racism and longed for the day that eugenics would be restored. Perhaps the most important source of support of eugenics research for more than 70 years has been the Pioneer Fund, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a hate group.

Apart from these curious historical omissions, Gerson’s careless reference to genetic screening seems calculated to associate it with abortion and even Nazism. Perhaps Gerson has not, as I have, spent many hours in neonatal intensive care units with doctors and nurses who care for infants with severe genetic anomalies and who are destined to live short, painful lives. He is entitled to believe that the aggressive and successful efforts by the Jewish community to eliminate Tay-Sachs disease through genetic counseling and screening are misguided, but he is not entitled arbitrarily to associate those efforts with a moral taint, much less Nazism. I have also seen courageous parents take their babies born with Trisomy 13 home to die. Those who moralize about such matters adopt a perilous course.

Gerson’s selective history might be ascribed to a bad case of amnesia. Concluding his piece with a dire warning to liberals who are blinded by their “war on equality,” he proves not only to be a bad historian of the turn of the last century but a miserable one about the past 60 years. Unless, as a movement committed to a war on equality, liberals simply lost their way when they championed civil rights for African-Americans, women, and gays.

Pardon me, sir, but conservatives are in no position to lecture liberals about human equality.

Tags: genetics, scientific integrity

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