Date: 01 Oct 2008 07:59 Subject: Supreme Court meme Security: Public Mood: reflective

(Non-Americans, I would love it if you posted a foundational court case in your system.)

Via dakiwiboid: The Rules: Post info about ONE Supreme Court decision, modern or historic to your lj. (Any decision, as long as it's not Roe v. Wade.) For those who see this on your f-list, take the meme to your OWN lj to spread the fun.

I want to go back a bit, and to post a decision I don't love.
BUCK v. BELL, Superintendent of State Colony Epileptics and Feeble Minded, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).

It's a very short decision, five paragraphs. Carrie Buck was a "feeble-minded"^* woman who had borne an illegitimate child and had been committed to an institution by her foster parents. The State of Virginia had passed a law saying " the Commonwealth is supporting in various institutions many defective persons who if now discharged would become a menace but if incapable of procreating might be discharged with safety and become self-supporting with benefit to themselves and to society; ". In other words, to get out of the asylum, Carrie must be sterilized.

The Supreme Court considered this decision, and ruled, in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous phrase, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." The State's interest in preventing the spread of feeble-mindedness and crime was paramount.

I cite this case because it's a reminder that the Supreme Court is inherently a product of its times. Eugenics was a widely-held belief among the ruling classes in 1927: by keeping the 'degenerates' from breeding, society could be protected from their increase. This belief shows up in, for instance, Jean Webster's Dear Enemy, the sequel to Daddy Long-Legs, in which Jerusha's friend Sallie winds up running an orphan asylum. The benefactor of the orphanage strongly recommends her reading Henry H. Goddard's 1912 The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. After reluctantly reading, Sallie replies

You didn't come today. Please don't skip us tomorrow. I have
finished the Kallikak family and I am bursting with talk. Don't
you think we ought to have a psychologist examine these children?

We owe it to adopting parents not to saddle them with feeble-
minded offspring.

You know, I'm tempted to ask you to prescribe arsenic for
Loretta's cold. I've diagnosed her case; she's a Kallikak. Is
it right to let her grow up and found a line of 378 feeble-minded
people for society to care for? Oh dear! I do hate to poison
the child, but what can I do?

The protagonist is obviously joking in proposing the Final Solution in the last paragraph, but she's quite serious about weeding out her inferior children from the adoptable pool.

We get, in some sense, the Court we deserve, or perhaps the Court that we are.


^*Carrie Buck was in no way feeble-minded nor, as the late Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, was her daughter. Her daughter's intelligence was determined by a single social worker on the basis that "there was something not quite normal about her" at the age of seven months. I don't know if any of the appellate briefs argued this; probably not. Later research suggests that the real reason Carrie was committed was that the pregnancy was the result of rape by a relative of her foster parents'.

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Date: 01 Oct 2008 11:20 Subject: Oops Security: Public

I just pottered around the house, opened a couple of packages watered some cut flowers, and went out to run errands -- picking up a hold at the library, chatting with the librarian; looking for a lorgnette at the store, chatting with the owner; putting gas in the car and going home.

I got in, and my son said, "What's that on your face? It looks red, but it doesn't look like blood."

I went to the bathroom mirror. The left side of my face was covered with raised welts of crimson lily pollen. And the librarian and antiquist and been too polite to comment, but probably thought I had a horrible disease.

I scrubbed it down and now have merely a pale yellow tinge on my skin and hair. Ah, well.

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Date: 01 Oct 2008 14:32 Subject: This is unusual? Security: Public Mood: puzzled

I'm watching a pop-science lecture on the brain (hint: it started out with a 10-minute recap of evolution, including footage from Jurassic Park). Up on the screen is this quote from Albert Einstein:

"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."

According to the lecturer, this is further evidence that Einstein was on the autism spectrum. Apparently I am, too; it doesn't seem at all an unusual or outre philosophy to me. Here's the context. The lecturer: "It's not bad; it's just a different way of seeing the world."

Do you guys, reading that paragraph, think, "Wow, what a strange man, he's certainly not like me?" (Modulo the hair. Unless you do have Einstein hair.) To me, it just sounds like a normal perspective for an introvert.

N.B. The pop-science lecture is required for a course I'm taking. I'm not having high expectations of the course...

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