Hey, Times are Tough

Courtesy of The Rude Pundit, whom I read and love like a secret daily vice.  You should too.

He is no fan of jerks, of whatever political persuasion, though he saves his best ammo for conservative idiocy.  The Rude Pundit usually always nails it, and his column of 21 June was no exception, where he discusses North Carolina's forced sterilization program that ran from 1929...through 1974.

1974.  Thinks about that. 

He points out that many of the victims still are around today, and the NC state legislature considered financial reparations (excuse the language, if you are easily offended...The Rude Pundit uses profanity and crude sexual analogies to make his points):

Your Daily Example of Republican Fuckery:  So used to be that North Carolina, like many states, had a eugenics program. That is, under a misguided belief that you could breed out the bad, the damaged, the feeble, people were sterilized, sometimes for things like being a rude kid at school (which means that Bart Simpson would have lost his nuts) or liking to fuck around. Thing is that most places stopped the practice when they understood, oh, shit, this is the kind of thing that Hitler believed.

Not North Carolina, though. Nope, "it actually ramped up its program after the war. Between 1929 and 1974, North Carolina forcibly sterilized about 7,600 people whom the state deemed 'feeble-minded' or otherwise undesirable. Many were poor black women." Since it ain't something from the distant, distant past, some of the actual victims, not their families or descendants, but the sterilized people themselves are still alive. Keep that in mind: we're not talking reparations for slavery.

So, in an example of decency, after a few years of activism and negotiations, with a formal apology issued in 2002, the Democratic Governor and the Republican House Speaker had come up with compensation for the victims. $50,000 each, with $10 million budgeted for the purpose. It ain't perfect, but it's something.

Enter the Senate Republicans, who said to the victims, "Fuck your pain." Yep, they blocked the effort and the compensation fund failed to be included in the state budget.

The rest of the blog post contains all the good reasons flimsy excuses as to why the legislators could not be bothered.