From the perspective of the Catholic League, there was nothing great about the eugenicist founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. Her understanding of population control, emblematic of the people-are-the-problem mentality, was complete with racist ideas. Yet none of this stopped her from being incorporated in a CNN program, “Perspectives,” that honored Women’s History Month. Still worse was the fact that the portion of the tape that was run included remarks that were disparaging of priests.
In a 1957 interview with Mike Wallace, Sanger dismissed the Church’s embrace of natural law as “unnatural,” claiming that “nothing bears it out.” She couldn’t resist adding, “How do they [priests] know? I mean, after all, they’re celibates. They don’t know love, they know nothing about bringing up children, or any of the marriage problems of life. And yet they speak to people as if they were God.”
But it is not priests who act like they’re God by advising world bodies on the question of who should be born. That godly power goes to homophobians like Sanger. In any event, the decision to resurrect this clip from Sanger’s video anthology suggests a need on the part of the producers of the show to make a statement about Catholicism. The show, incidentally, opened with a glowing commentary from Hillary Clinton.
