Lying To Make Friends

I feel sorry for Jonah Goldberg, a man caught between two worlds. He wants desperately to be accepted as an intellectual by smart, serious people, yet he also wants to get rich selling books to very stupid people. So he ends up doing things like writing a book where he calls liberals Nazis (using such unassailable logic as that both liberals and Nazis like organic food), then ties himself in knots explaining that he doesn’t really think that liberals are Nazis, except that actually he does.

And so here comes his latest masterpiece, in which he kinda sorta but not really accuses Ruth Bader Ginsburg of supporting eugenics. In a recent NY Times Magazine interview with Emily Bazelon, Ginsburg says she was surprised that the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a law outlawing the use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortions because she thought some people supported abortion rights out of a concern for population growth, “particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Now, a more shameless right wing hack like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter would have ignored the distinction between positive and normative statements and blasted Ginsburg for calling for a holocaust of poor minority children. But Goldberg has intellectual scruples, so instead he just insinuates that Ginsburg might support eugenics because she doesn’t make clear whether or not she endorses the view she believed others held 29 years ago. (I’ve never met Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but I think I can safely answer Goldberg’s question: no, Ginsburg is not in favor of using abortion to limit poor and minority populations.) It’s weird to imagine a world in which every time someone made a descriptive or predictive statement they would then have to explain whether or not they were in favor of the circumstance they were describing; it would certainly make weather forecasts more interesting.

But, for kicks lets examine Goldberg’s basis for even suggesting the Ginsburg might be pro-eugenics. You see, almost 100 years ago, some prominent people did see abortion as a tool for controlling minority and/or poor populations, one of whom was a woman (like Ginsburg!) and one of whom was a Supreme Court justice (like Ginsburg!)

Of course, like a good conservative, Goldberg makes clear that the real villain is the media, with their unfair double standards, giving liberals a free pass while bullying poor conservatives. Bazelon didn’t even ask Ginsburg if she was pro-eugenics or anti-eugenics! And I bet Goldberg is right that none of those cowardly senators will ask Sotomayor if she’s pro- or anti-eugenics. Of course, the only reason one would think that such questions need to be asked is if one believes that all liberals are in fact Nazis. . . or owes 95% of his income to pretending he does.

-AR