See all in News Features

The stupid economy

News Features

Breeding injustice

Amazingly, these connections — and glaring and illuminating similarities — between eugenics and same-sex-marriage prohibitions have not been explored. Yet there’s nothing complicated about them. As the Eugenics Health Foundation espoused, the eugenics movement aimed to “promote and encourage the marriage of normal young people” (614). Western culture has long respected marriage as an important contract, but the fear of its being ruined by the wrong people began with eugenics. The alleged threat that gay people pose to marriage today is nothing more than eugenics propaganda. If we let it fester, someone might one day measure your own family’s “fitness.”

On the Web
Beyond Same-Sex Marraige: http://www.beyondmarriage.org/
Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/
American Philosophical Society: http://www.amphilsoc.org/
Freedom to Marry: http://www.amphilsoc.org/
Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders: http://www.glad.org/
Disability Social History Project: http://www.disabilityhistory.org/
American Eugenics Society Records: http://www.amphilsoc.org/library/mole/a/aes.htm

Email the author
Michael J. Amico: michael.amico@dartmouth.edu

• Share:
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•