sara, um maybe a series of books or movies, or schools you attended, or your favorite friends in the box.

ita, your link is to virtual model.

Oops. Fixed.

Is not.

I have never been so ashamed to have been born a Hoosier. *sigh*

Californians have their share of shame!

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Eugenic Sterilization Laws
Paul Lombardo, University of Virginia

While some eugenicists privately supported practices such as euthanasia or even genocide, legally-mandated sterilization was the most radical policy supported by the American eugenics movement. A number of American physicians performed sterilizations even before the surgery was legally approved, though no reliable accounting of the practice exists prior to passage of sterilization laws. Indiana enacted the first law allowing sterilization on eugenic grounds in 1907, with Connecticut following soon after. Despite these early statutes, sterilization did not gain widespread popular approval until the late 1920s.

Advocacy in favor of sterilization was one of Harry Laughlin’s first major projects at the Eugenics Record Office. In 1914, he published a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law that proposed to authorize sterilization of the "socially inadequate" – people supported in institutions or "maintained wholly or in part by public expense. The law encompassed the "feebleminded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf; deformed; and dependent" – including "orphans, ne'er-do-wells, tramps, the homeless and paupers." By the time the Model Law was published in 1914, twelve states had enacted sterilization laws.

By 1924, approximately 3,000 people had been involuntarily sterilized in America; the vast majority (2,500) in California. That year Virginia passed a Eugenical Sterilization Act based on Laughlin’s Model Law. It was adopted as part of a cost-saving strategy to relieve the tax burden in a state where public facilities for the "insane" and "feebleminded" had experienced rapid growth. The law was also written to protect physicians who performed sterilizing operations from malpractice lawsuits. Virginia’s law asserted that "heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, idiocy, imbecility, epilepsy and crime…" It focused on "defective persons" whose reproduction represented "a menace to society."

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I'll note that historically this sterilization movement was a common way to strike at miscegenation, which is at the root of the commonly held notion in some black communities that birth control is an evil plan by whitey to breed them out. Sounds crazy now, but it pretty much was the evil plan by whitey.

Is not.

Is too.

Now.

Co-workers around me are trying to work out how to ditch the filming meeting. At least I won't look slack alone. In fact, some keeners are ditching.

I'll note that historically this sterilization movement was a common way to strike at miscegenation, which is at the root of the commonly held notion in some black communities that birth control is an evil plan by whitey to breed them out. Sounds crazy now, but it pretty much was the evil plan by whitey.

Yeah, it's like on another board where someone was all HOW DARE HE when Farakkahn said the levees were breached on purpose in black neighborhoods to spare the white ones. Louis is a prick, but that was just about SOP for a long time in a lot of places.

Oh, and also (let's see if I can cut and paste this time):

Fans of the Mormon boy band Everclean were taken aback (and affront, it would seem) when they popped the video of the group's Sons of Provo into their DVD players and discovered a movie entitled Adored: Diary of a Porn Star instead, the Salt Lake City Deseret Morning News reported today (Wednesday). Deseret Book Co. told the newspaper that it had removed the film from its shelves. Apparently the mix-up occurred after the producers of Adored and Sons of Provo each hired the same Los Angeles-based company to produce the DVD copies and distribute them. "This is hugely damaging," said George Dayton, head of business affairs for HaleStorm, the company that produced Son of Provo. Although Adored was described as a "heartwarming film about a porn star" and not a porn film itself, Dayton said that it matters little "whether it's some soft-core title or whatever. ... This title doesn't lend itself to good, clean family or LDS [Church of Latter Day Saints] -centered entertainment."

I don't understand for celebs what the upside of a sex tape is, that it overrides the risk of losing it.

Me neither, unless you believe that no publicity is bad publicity.

Which, given Tom Cruise's behavior earlier this year and the box office performance of War of the Worlds, isn't unfounded.

Still, Indiana has a special relationship with the history of eugenics.

Indiana Eugenics Timeline

I really think this is the history that needs to be taught. This is when you really get how fucked up our history has been at an institutional level.