So this judge in Tennessee got in big trouble last year for offering inmates in his county a 30 day reduction in their jail sentence if they volunteered for a sterilization procedure:
"When Judge Sam Benningfield of White County, Tenn., offered to shave off jail time for inmates who volunteered for sterilization, a chorus of attorneys, advocates and public officials reacted with horror."
Horror? Why?
"Benningfield said his goal was to break a 'vicious cycle' of repeat drug offenders with children. But many argued that the proposal, outlined in a May order, was nothing short of eugenics."
Don't get me wrong, I am not supporting forced sterilization of anyone, which would be an intolerable violation of their life and liberty, but this program was completely voluntary.
No one was being threatened with 30 additional days in confinement if they didn't comply.
They were already sentenced to those 30 days for a crime they had committed. These inmates were being offered 30 days off their sentence and a free contraceptive procedure if they wanted it. They were free to say no and serve out the sentence they were already sentenced to serve out regardless.
This judge just gave inmates more options.
"Civil rights lawyers brought legal actions and a local prosecutor told his staff to avoid the judge’s program at all costs.
Now, after the wave of backlash and amid multiple lawsuits, state judicial regulators have formally reprimanded Benningfield for promising 30-day sentence reductions to inmates who agreed to receive vasectomies or birth control implants."
Everybody was worried that offering a 30 day reduction in their sentence would be unduly coercing them, but it's not coercion.
It's offering an additional incentive to get a free health care procedure that most people have to pay good money for and that Sandra Fluke wishes she could have gotten as a student at Georgetown University Law School.
Democrats mobilized to ThreatCon1 over Sandra Fluke's right to get a private university to cover her contraceptive costs, then a judge in Tennessee offers it to prison inmates for free plus reducing their sentences and everybody loses their minds.
This guy should have been like the Bernie Sanders style socialism movement's hero or something.
Maybe some of those inmates actually don't want to have any kids in the future, and would have been happy to have their sentence reduced plus free permanent contraption.
Any of them who do want to have kids were free to decline and serve out their sentence, not as a punishment for declining the sterilization procedure, but because they were already sentenced to serve those days in confinement anyway.
That doesn't look like coercion to me.
There is a clear distinction between coercive, tyrannical eugenics that violates people's liberty, and a libertarian eugenics that would actually decrease the amount of coercion and tyranny in our society while also promoting a more healthy population.
An example of the latter kind would be making voluntary sterilization a requirement to receive welfare benefits.
My argument is simple: No one is entitled to welfare benefits anyways. They are a gift of a prosperous, generous, and charitable society, and they are made possible by the world's productive people who don't need handouts.
If the recipients of social safety net programs can't or won't contribute something of value back to society, they are simply taking without giving back. They should have to do something to promote the general welfare for their own part.
And all I'm asking is that in exchange for the gift of maintaining their lives at the expense of the hard work of others for no contribution in return, they forfeit their reproductive prerogative.
Actually my argument is even more simple than that: If you can't take care of yourself, then you can't take care of children.
If in America, in the 21st century, with all the freedom and opportunity as there's ever been in the history of humanity, you're unable or unwilling to clothe, feed, and shelter yourself through your own efforts without taking from other people without giving anything in return, then it's damn near a fundamental human right for no one to have to have you for their parent.
If you accept welfare benefits, you are saying, "I am incapable of taking care of myself. I'm a grown man or woman, but I need an actual adult to take care of me." Well if you can't take care of yourself, then you can't take care of someone else, and the government should not be in the business of causing some poor child to be stuck with you as a parent by covering your welfare benefits and subsidizing you to reproduce.
You think the kind of person who takes multiple sick days every month, never shows up on time, has a terrible attitude, can't follow simple instructions, and thus can't even hold down a job at a fast food restaurant or retail chain store, will be able to take good care of a baby? If they want to have kids, no one should be allowed to forcibly stop them, but no one should pay for that horror story either, and certainly no one should be forced to pay for it.
That's especially true when you consider the ones who are being forced to pay for it have kids of their own, and the welfare state takes from those families to incentivize people who can't even take care of themselves to have children and inevitably raise them up to be as hopeless and feeble as they are. It is the explicit, codified, institutionalized sacrifice of the interests of the good, the strong, the healthy, the capable, the noble, to the bad, the weak, the sickly, the incapable, the wretched.
The result is fewer of the healthy and strong (made less healthy and less strong), and more of the sickly and weak, which was the goal all along, the means being the ends in the making– the immolation and destruction of the ideal, and the elevation of the botched– the socialist's profoundly unnatural and perverted loathing for the ideal and idealization of the loathsome.
That they are willing to hand children over to such as these, indeed to help and encourage them to have children, is a sufficient indictment of their claim to empathy and benevolence.
