Hillary Clinton, Talk Is Cheap

Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton gave a commencement address exhorting a group of university graduates to speak out against "the degradation of women or minorities, the weak, the vulnerable, the marginalized."

Nice inspiring sentiment. I'd take her purported concern for justice a lot more seriously if it weren't for the fact that (as I blogged not long ago) Sen. Clinton has made it clear that she wants to "prevent" the existence of "anything along the autism spectrum." She doesn't even acknowledge that the autism spectrum is made up of human beings—apparently we're just inconvenient things to be eliminated.

Several people commented on my earlier post that it appeared Sen. Clinton was speaking out of ignorance and pandering to wealthy supporters, rather than expressing deep feelings of hate. That's probably true enough. There aren't many Americans who actually hate autistics; indeed, there aren't many who even had a clear idea of what the word meant before the recent "autism awareness" propaganda campaign began. Until a few years ago, most Americans just thought of their autistic neighbors and co-workers as people. But ignorance can be deadly, even without deep-rooted malice.

Many of us don't realize how quickly genocidal prejudice can spread. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a comment on the Autism Vox blog from someone who claimed that autistics were not truly human because of differences in mirror neuron function. Here's what struck me about that: Until quite recently, nobody had ever heard of mirror neurons, except for a few neuroscientists in research programs—and I think we can safely say that the ignorant yahoo who posted that comment wasn't one of them. Evidently, for said yahoo, all it took was a dumbed-down popular science article or two, reporting on a preliminary study of mirror neurons (as to which very little is even known yet) to transform millions of people worldwide into some sort of hideous subhuman infestation.

This is not, of course, the first time in history that a minority group has been systematically dehumanized by the twisting of science to fit a prejudiced agenda. In its first go-round, about a century ago, eugenics in America consisted of efforts to prove by scientific means that non-whites were mentally inferior. Researchers often wrote scholarly-looking articles to that effect. Not long afterward, the Nazis had their own doctors and scientists who claimed to have proof that Jews lacked various attributes of true humanity. There were many otherwise intelligent people who actually believed that stuff.

Now it's happening all over again, with the connivance of amoral politicians like Hillary Clinton, whose concern for vulnerable marginalized minorities goes only as far as the campaign donations of those minorities.

If Sen. Clinton really cared about justice for marginalized and misunderstood groups, she would not be participating in an effort to exterminate one.

Eugenics is totally incompatible with respect for diversity.