I saw you leave on the security screen.

I knew it would be the last time.

I try to recall your blogwatch,

No longer its original form.

Memory fades…

Syria Comment: What it sounds like. (Here’s my Weekly Standard piece on blogs in Middle Eastern and Muslim countries.) Via Hit and Run.

“The Bad Seed: Why did so many American churches embrace eugenics?” Excerpts: “…Hard though this may be to credit, the reactionaries were so blinkered as to suggest that eugenics itself might be a passing fad, which future generations would dismiss with a shudder. …

“…By far the most systematic critique can be found in G. K. Chesterton’s Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), almost every line of which clamors for quotation. Chesterton not only demolished the evidence offered to support the new pseudo-science but also brilliantly analyzed its policy consequences. …

“In its day, Chesterton’s title was meant to be provocative or shocking, but in retrospect it seems merely descriptive. Of course eugenics was, and is, a blatant evil. Whoever could have thought otherwise? In fact, as Rosen notes, a great many people bought the eugenic package, including–or especially–in the religious community….

“By no means all Christians were enchanted with the eugenic dream, which at so many points contradicted traditional views of humanity, no less than of charity. Eugenics clearly fostered determinism at the expense of human free will or moral responsibility. But particular churches had their own difficulties with the new movement. The fact that eugenics was so closely tied to evolutionary assumptions naturally alienated evangelicals and fundamentalists, just as predictably as it appealed to liberals and modernists.

“Most Catholics were appalled at the movement’s easy acceptance of sterilization and contraception, and Catholic lobbying resulted in the defeat of many proposed eugenic laws. Rosen shows that this anti-eugenic fervor was not a foregone conclusion, and some modernizing Catholics were prepared to work with the AES. Generally, though, the Catholic Church provided a firm bulwark against eugenic ‘reform.’ When in 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court famously upheld the sterilization of Carrie Buck, the lone dissenter was the court’s one Catholic Justice, Pierce Butler. For liberals, such obstructionism proved yet again that the Catholic tradition could never truly be reconciled with secular democracy .As late as 1949, Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power ranted against Catholic willingness to allow defectives and even ‘monsters’ to be born alive, and to be viewed as full human beings.

“In the case of eugenics, historical opinion would strongly suggest that the modernizers were dead wrong, and that the churches definitely should not have ‘moved with the times’ or accepted ‘the insights of modern science.’ To paraphrase Chesterton, it was only loyalty to traditional Christian beliefs that preserved the individual believer ‘from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.'”

more

via Amy Welborn.