LAC News
Smithsonian Honors Racist Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger — On Your Dime
By By Marian L. Ward
December 2008

In October 2008, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery opened its “Women of Our Time: Twentieth Century Photographs” exhibit.  The collection includes a broad range of history-making women, including First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and runner Marion Jones.

Journalist, author, former ambassador and congresswoman Clare Booth Luce is one of the few conservatives to make the cut.

The exhibit is intended to honor women who are or were “significant figures in their chosen fields,” according to curator Ann Shumard.  A total of 90 portraits are included in the photographic display.

Honored alongside these women is none other than Margaret Sanger — known racist and eugenicist — the founder of “non-profit” abortion giant Planned Parenthood.  Sanger is described on the virtual tour of the exhibit as a “reformer” who faced “stiff opposition” with the “courage of a wounded tiger.”

I guess it does take “courage” to attempt to “exterminate the negro population,” or “segregate morons (mentally handicapped)” — which she described as “a dead weight of human waste.”  The same “wounded tiger” advocated “prevent[ing] the multiplication of this bad stock” and believed “[Slavs, Latin, and Hebrew immigrants are] human weeds ... a deadweight of human waste ... [Blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a] menace to the race.” (Quotes compiled by American Life League)

Interviewed by CNS News, Shumard was asked if the exhibit intended to “celebrate” Sanger’s ideology.  She didn’t have an answer, but remarked, “[Sanger] made an impact on the 20^th century in a significant way.  I don’t think you can tell the story of the 20^th century without discussing the degree to which family planning impacted women’s entry into the workplace.”

Rounding out the leftist feminist-heavy exhibit are: Emma Goldman, a violent anarchist who was once dubbed “one of the most dangerous extremists in America;” Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. magazine and her protégé Susan Faludi, Wall Street Journal reporter; and pro-Bolshevik (read communist) journalist Louise Bryant.

There is no surprise in such a display at the Smithsonian.  The real issue in this situation, besides the severely left-leaning imbalance of representation, is that of who is footing the bill. 

You guessed it!  In the midst of an economic crisis, the likes of which the country hasn’t seen in decades, not only are taxpayers forced to support the profit-rich abortion giant Planned Parenthood, but we get to subsidize a nauseating display to deify its founder as well.