In 1960 a woman named Margaret Sanger threatened to “find another place to live” if John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, was elected president. Does this threat sound familiar? On July 6, 1960, the Milwaukee Journal ran this headline on its front page: “If Kennedy wins, Mrs. Sanger is going to quit US.” Interestingly enough, after the election—which Kennedy won, Mrs. Sanger never left.
Sanger told the Milwaukee Journal she was opposed to Kennedy because of his religion. Here is a direct quote from Sanger to the Milwaukee paper: “In my estimation a Roman Catholic is neither Democrat nor Republican. Nor American, nor Chinese; he is a Roman Catholic.”
Margaret Sanger hated the Catholic Church. She described the Church as an “archenemy of progress and enlightenment; an enemy out to destroy America’s liberties and thereby establish its own rules and dominion.”
Who was Margaret Sanger? She was born Margaret Higgins in 1879 in New York to Irish American parents. To be Irish in America at that time was to be Catholic. But Margaret’s father was the “village atheist,” a radical socialist who would not allow his wife and children to practice their faith.
Margaret grew up to be a radical socialist herself. She married a Jewish architect named William Sanger. Like Margaret’s father, William Sanger was also an atheist, socialist, and a radical anarchist. He was open to the violent overthrow of society and the family. One of the weapons used for such an overthrow was the promotion of “free love,” which in traditional Christian terms was known as adultery and fornication.
William Sanger taught his wife his radical socialist ideas all too well, for she embraced the doctrine of “free love” with a passion, and afterwards the two were divorced. In her autobiography, Margaret rationalized her sexual behavior as science, claiming that uninhibited sexual relations would help humans to achieve true evolutionary greatness, or genius. But Sanger wrote that her enemy, the Church, with its “ethical dogmas of the past,” were blocking “the way to true civilization.”
Margaret claimed her sexual behavior was not just scientific, it was religious. She wrote the “primordial energies of man” could be seen as “divine expressions.” She wrote: “We must teach men the overwhelming power of this radiant force…Through sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world.” But Sanger’s enemy, the Church, Sanger warned, taught a “sentimental fantasy” of heavenly existence. She preached that when men threw off Christianity, they would realize heaven on earth. An earthly sexual utopia would be what Margaret called her “paradise, our everlasting abode, our Heaven and our eternity.”
After leaving her first husband and children, Margaret Sanger went on to become the nation’s number one advocate for birth control. And by championing birth control, she painted the image that she was a crusader for the poor. Her words and actions, however, betrayed the image.
In 1916 Sanger started an organization called the Birth Control League, and in 1917 she began publishing The Birth Control Review. The magazine’s slogan which appeared on the cover until 1929 was “To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds.”
Sanger was not writing about horses. She was writing about human beings. In her autobiography, she wrote, “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” She wrote it was “stupid, cruel sentimentalism” to allow inferior types to breed. Doing so only “produced a race of degenerates.”
For Sanger, Christian charity did not attack the root of the problem. Charity, Sanger wrote, only “encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents, and dependents;” what she called “the most dangerous elements of the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress.” Charity would only perpetuate what Sanger wrote was “the dead weight of human waste.” (See Architects of the Culture of Death, 2004, pp 287-302.)
In 1942, when it became apparent that Sanger’s Birth Control League promoted much of the same racist, eugenic ideology as Nazi Germany, Sanger’s organization changed its name to Planned Parenthood. Since then, the company Sanger founded has gone on to become the premiere abortion company in the world, making billions of dollars by selling “free love.” Today broken people are looking around at all the carnage and are coming to realize what was sold was neither “free” nor “love.”
In 2015 Planned Parenthood was exposed for trafficking aborted baby parts. It was caught selling brains, eyes, kidneys, livers, and anything else that might be profitable. You see, in efficient Nazi fashion, the life is unworthy of life, but the parts are worth money. The “dead weight of human waste” has value after all. This is the demonic legacy of Margaret Sanger, who preached that by engaging in free love “mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world.”
What about you? Do you feel illuminated living in our sexually transformed world—a world Margaret Sanger promised was our “paradise, our everlasting abode, our Heaven and our eternity?” Well, ask yourself: “How can earth be our everlasting abode, our eternity?” The earth is a fading away planet lit up by a burning out star. That’s a scientific fact. What kind of blind fool worships something that is material, that is doomed to decay? That is just “stupid, cruel sentimentalism,” is it not?
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone.
Isaiah’s prophecy about light was fulfilled 2000 years ago in the region known as the Galilee of the Gentiles. And what was the first thing the Light said? Not something sentimental. Instead, it was “Repent!”
Human nature being what it is, people most likely responded by saying things like, “This man is an arch-enemy of progress and enlightenment, an enemy out to destroy our liberties and thereby establish His own rules and dominion.” Others no doubt complained, “This kind of talk may have worked in Moses’ day, but these are modern times. These old ethical dogmas of the past are blocking the way to progress and true civilization.”
How do we know people said things like that? We know because later on, despite Christ’s miracles, the people in that area did not repent. And afterwards Christ told the whole place it was going to hell. How did people respond to that? Most likely the same way people do today. Some scoffed, some laughed, and others became filled with hatred. But some saw the light and repented. And they worshipped Christ.
Margaret Sanger worshipped the sex act. Then she got old. No longer physically desirable, she turned to drugs and alcohol. She ended up wandering the streets before being placed in a nursing home, where she died.
My friends, who has the truth? We just examined the ugly foundation of Planned Parenthood. What about the foundation of Christianity? We saw the start of the Church’s government in Sunday’s gospel passage, the choosing of the first Apostles. This happened during the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, when Rome ruled the world. Margaret Sanger had the truth about one thing: a Roman Catholic is neither Democrat nor Republican, American nor Chinese; he is a Roman Catholic.
And so, some scoff, some laugh, some hate. Others repent and believe.
Pray you are always in the latter group. Pray you are always ready to die for the truth, because He died for you first. That way you won’t be miserable like the people who worship material things that fade away. Instead, worship the light who is Christ. Do that, and you will live a life of humility, and gratitude, and true freedom, as you progress on your way to the true civilization, the true everlasting abode in heaven.
Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash
