Most people don’t realize that many of the terrible eugenics and marriage laws that characterized Nazi Germany trace their origin back to the United States. It’s hard to see our history clearly, and this story is a step in the right direction.
From Burlington Free Press:
If the state of Vermont had carried out a plan to sterilize his grandmother, Don Stevens said Tuesday, he “wouldn’t be here.”Many Vermonters of mixed French Canadian and American Indian heritage, like Stevens’ grandmother, as well as poor, rural whites, were placed on a state-sanctioned list of “mental defectives” and degenerates in the 1930s and placed in state institutions like the Home for the Feeble Minded in Brandon.
Some had surgery after Gov. Stanley Wilson in 1931 won enactment of a sterilization law. It was designed to…