Hullabaloo

Thursday, June 21, 2012

 
North Carolina cretins say they're sorry about the forced sterilization but money won't help

by digby

Jezebel reports:

Between 1929 and 1974, the North Carolina Eugenics Board sterilized thousands of men and women without their knowledge or consent, most of whom were poor, black, disabled, institutionalized, or undereducated. According to TPM, an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 of them are still alive, and 146 of them have been found and verified. After years of working with victims to come up with an acceptable solution, the state's House, led by Republican speaker Thom Tillis, proposed paying $50,000 to each of the living victims of the state's foray into messing with the gene pool. A total of $10 million was set aside for currently known and to-be-discovered victims.

But apparently spending state money to compensate victims of a very recent state initiative was just too much to ask of Senate Republicans. Sen. Don East said, "I'm so sorry it happened, but throwing money don't change it, don't make it go away. It still happened."
[...]
Sen. Austin Allrand echoed East's dickhole sentiments, telling the AP, "I'm not so sure it would lay the issue at rest because if you start compensating people who have been ‘victimized' by past history, I don't know where that would end."

If anyone's been looking for the neanderthal logic behind "tort reform" this is it. It's a shame when people do bad things to other people but we can't change it after the fact so you're shit out 'o luck. Even this lady:

Elaine Riddick Jessie (born Elaine Riddick in 1954) is an African-American woman who, as a 14-year-old girl in 1968, was forcibly sterilized by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, which argued that she was "feebleminded" and "promiscuous."

Prior to the sterilization (at age 13), Jessie had been kidnapped, molested, and raped. Her son, Tony Riddick, states, "The work of the Eugenics Board was not far from the thinking of Hitler."

Jessie was living with her grandmother, Maggie "Miss Peaches" Woodard, when a social worker discovered her pregnancy. The illiterate Woodard signed an X on a consent form, not knowing what it was, only that if she didn't sign, Elaine would be sent to an orphanage. The Perquimans County Department of Public Welfare had earlier custody of Jessie and her 7 siblings (from their alcoholic parents), sending 5 to an orphanage, and Elaine and one of her sisters to live with Woodard.

In March 2003 Mrs. Jessie and other victims of the Eugenics Board spoke out against the atrocities committed to the Eugenics Study Committee. As she said "When you're a little girl, what do you want? You want to be a mommy. To find out that's been taken away from you is devastating." She was prominent in the celebrations at the law's repeal.

Yeah, it's true that money can't fix that. But it's all we've got. That women deserves some kind of compensation for what was done to her. She's 58 years old and has another quarter century to live on this earth with the knowledge of what was done to her. Is it really too much to ask for these cretinous pigs to be human just once?

Don't answer that ...


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digby 6/21/2012 04:30:00 PM