By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Some 30 years ago, Mrs. Alice du Pont Mills invited me to visit her in her expansive Virginia horse farm — several thousand acres of it — about an hour west of Washington.
At the time, I was staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, and Mrs. Mills told me that she was very concerned about the situation in Central America, where Communist-inspired revolutionaries were creating chaos in several countries at the time.
Mrs. Mills was also an avid horsewoman. Since I had grown up around horses myself, I was glad to take the drive out into the country. In our conversation, it quickly became clear that Mrs. Mills was not so interested in the warring factions of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador thousands of miles away; no, she had other fish to fry.
Mrs. Mills was worried. After the Vietnam War, ten percent of the Vietnamese population had become “boat people,” fleeing from Communism and truly risking their lives — in fact, thousands of them died trying to escape.
But they had to leave by boat. Not the Mexicans. There’s no ocean between the U.S. and Mexico — just the Rio Grande River.
Well, back then, some 100 million people lived between the Rio Grande and the Panama Canal.
And Mrs. Mills was dead set on preventing ten percent of them from coming to the United States. In fact, because there was no risk of dying at sea, she was concerned that the percentage might be significantly higher.
I didn’t know it until later, but Mrs. Mills was a longtime member of the National Board of Planned Parenthood. She was a generous supporter and even worked with local Planned Parenthood groups here in Virginia.
That explains why she revealed to me a surprising fact that rather startled me 30 years ago: Mrs. Mills was also active in Mexico.
Aware that it was illegal to sterilize immigrants once they were in the United States, she told me that she contributed heavily to sterilization clinics that were on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border.
There, the poor Hispanic women coming toward the United States could be coaxed — often with money — to be conveniently mutilated without any untidy legal consequences. Sure, they could continue on into the States, but they couldn’t reproduce. Thus, a great danger was prevented.
Mrs. Mills said this so matter-of-factly that she assumed that any American in his right mind would feel the same way.
As I took my leave, she generously showed me some beautiful paintings which, I remarked, I thought I had actually seen before.
No, she explained, I had seen reproductions — everywhere. These were actually the gorgeous originals that her son-in-law, the world-famous artist Jamie Wyeth, had painted. They were in a hallway, not well-lit museum-style, and there were several of them.
I knew that I was in the midst of old money. When we got to the door, I glanced off toward the pasture, turned down an invitation to visit the barns, and made my exit as cordially as I could.
Mrs. Mills died in 2002 ago at a ripe old age of 89. She was a generation younger than Margaret Sanger, to be sure — but Sanger lived until 1966, when Mrs. Mills was 54. If Mrs. Mills didn’t know Sanger personally, she undoubtedly knew that Planned Parenthood’s notorious foundress was a rabid racist and a grimly dedicated eugenicist.
Mrs. Mills was almost the personification of the highbrow super-rich Eastern secular elite (for the record, however, her obituary did state that she was an Episcopalian). She personified the searing-hot brand that P.J. O’Rourke had burned into the rump of the Population Controllers: “There’s just enough of me, and waaay too many of you.”
Margaret Sanger’s eugenics crusade targeted brown and black people everywhere — apparently including Italians and Greeks and Spaniards.
Yes, she was the classic nativist.
And Sanger’s passionate and vicious racism was the stock in trade of Alice du Pont Mills’ rampant and rabid campaign.
That racism is a driving force of America’s pro-abortion movement. Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, Sanger’s “blacks and browns” have been aborted in numbers far beyond their proportion of the population. Between 1973 and 1979, the number of abortions per year in the U.S. had doubled to 1.5 million. In some areas, more black babies were being aborted than were born. So when Catholic bishops published their pastoral letter on racism in 1979, they had a perfect opportunity to drive the message home: Racism drives abortion.
But they didn’t.
In 5,500 words, their pastoral never mentioned the word “abortion” even once.
Instead, their letter in effect alleged that “most” whites were Sangers. That is, that “most” whites were rabid and racist.
Of course, this is preposterous. How could our shepherds level such a blatant charge at their flock? Was this not a perfidious calumny, personified?
No, quite the contrary, they insisted. You see, it is “most” white Americans who are the sinners. Racism is such a “subtle sin,” the bishops explained, that whites might not even know they are guilty of it!
Of course, that fatuous allegation flies in the face of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which clearly states that a mortal sin must be “committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent” (CCC, n. 1857).
Moreover, the flimsy pastoral rests on some painful and not-so-subtle racism of its own: While “most” whites are racists, it says, nobody else is.
And that striking defamation still abides. After the recent violence here in Virginia, Msgr. J. Brian Bransfield, general secretary of the USCCB, sent a memo to all bishops that resonates the pastoral’s painfully flawed assumptions. Racism is “crude and blatant.” Msgr. Bransfield observes, but — apparently because “most” whites are not crude and blatant about it — their racism “persists in many hidden ways.”
To emphasize the bishops’ concern, this past week the burgeoning USCCB bureaucracy welcomed a new “Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism.” This committee will “welcome and support the implementation of the pastoral letter on racism anticipated for release in 2018.”
Ah — a new pastoral on racism, to be released next year! It’s fair to ask — will this generation of bishops come to their senses? Will they finally correct the record and admit the obvious — that anyone, of any race, can be a racist, and that nobody, of any race, has to be?
Or will their “crude and blatant” insult of 1979 remain? That we all Margaret Sangers?
If that’s the case, will their new pastoral bear the title, “Racism: Only Whites Need Apply”?
Pray for our bishops.
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