Anent our little item on state marriage bureaus (or for that matter their private enterprise Scientologist or Planned Parenthood versions), the following quote swam across our visual field.
[T]he problem with eugenics is eugenics itself. It’s not just that the eugenics practiced by the Nazis was coercive. The idea predated the Nazis. The book Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens (Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life) was not written by the Nazis. It was written by German progressives in the Weimar period, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, who were, respectively (as I recall), a jurist and a medical doctor. And they weren’t thugs like the Nazis; they were well-educated, well-intentioned, polite people—the kind of people that you’d be pleased to have dinner with.
-- Robert George, in an interview with Arthur Caplan conducted by Sherif Girgis
Caplan disagreed and replied that only coercive eugenics was wrong, and so we get a sense why it continues in polite circles even today.
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