- 24 Mar 2019 10:28
#14995588
Forced vaccination is a bad idea for a whole host of reasons but the most compelling reason for rejecting these policies that allow the state to violate informed consent is that it sets a very dangerous precedent:
So it starts with compulsory vaccination and then progresses into maniac eugenicists forcibly sterilizing people. This isn't some crazy totalitarian country that did this, this was a US Supreme Court decision from the modern era. There's already talk about adding lithium to the water supply to curb suicide rates and if we look a little further ahead it's not hard to imagine the principle of compulsory vaccination being used as a precedent to mandate genetic modifications that reduce aggression. There's not too much that can't be justified by invoking the public welfare and "the protection and health of the state".
"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927)
Buck v. Bell is a decision of the United States Supreme Court, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court has never expressly overturned Buck v. Bell.
[...]
The effect of Buck v. Bell was to legitimize eugenic sterilization laws in the United States as a whole. While many states already had sterilization laws on their books, their use was erratic and effects practically non-existent in every state except for California. After Buck v. Bell, dozens of states added new sterilization statutes, or updated their constitutionally non-functional ones already enacted, with statutes which more closely mirrored the Virginia statute upheld by the Court.[16]
[...]
The Virginia statute which the ruling of Buck v. Bell supported was designed in part by the eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin, superintendent of Charles Benedict Davenport's Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Laughlin had, a few years previously, conducted a number of studies on the enforcement of sterilization legislation throughout the country and had concluded that the reason for their lack of use was primarily that the physicians who would order the sterilizations were afraid of prosecution by patients whom they operated upon. Laughlin saw the need to create a "Model Law"[17] which could withstand a test of constitutional scrutiny, clearing the way for future sterilization operations. Adolf Hitler closely modelled his Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring on Laughlin's "Model Law". The Third Reich held Laughlin in such regard that they arranged for him to receive an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1936. At the Nuremberg trials after World War II, Nazi doctors explicitly cited Holmes's opinion in Buck v. Bell as part of their defense.
So it starts with compulsory vaccination and then progresses into maniac eugenicists forcibly sterilizing people. This isn't some crazy totalitarian country that did this, this was a US Supreme Court decision from the modern era. There's already talk about adding lithium to the water supply to curb suicide rates and if we look a little further ahead it's not hard to imagine the principle of compulsory vaccination being used as a precedent to mandate genetic modifications that reduce aggression. There's not too much that can't be justified by invoking the public welfare and "the protection and health of the state".
Socialism without freedom is fascism.