Marie Stopes, snob, ageist, antisemite, Hitler-admirer, homophobe, eugenicist, and abortionist

Every cloud, however nasty, has a silver lining for somebody. So it is not surprising that the vested interests involved in the Abortion Industry have enthusiastically grasped, with both hands, the opportunity to propagate their own highly specialised ideology during the pandemic crisis. With thousands dying each day, what better time is there to add a few more thousand to the fires!

There is a lot to be said for keeping a firm grasp on where this particular ethical tradition comes from. So ... never forget Stopes! Does anybody know [ironytriggerwarning] of a statue of her which we could go and pull down?

This unappealing woman is still a heroine of that sinister movement which spans pre-War Eugenicism, 'Birth Control', and the current Age of Abortion Victrix. It is hardly surprising that she was also anti-Semitic. I wonder if Hitler ever read the gushing letter she sent him in August 1939. The poor fellow might have been too busy at just that moment to keep up to date with the correspondence he received from daft admirers. What a shame.

But I wonder how many people realise what a homophobic bigot she was.

Catholic moral teaching, of course, regards genital homosexual acts as intrinsically disordered. It enters a similarly negative judgement against contraceptive sex, even within Marriage. Not to mention  Masturbation and all those -philias. It has no specific bias against humans belonging to any 'orientation', simply against whatever is contra Naturam. At its best, it is dispassionate, logical, and avoids ranting. It loves the person, however frequent his/her lapses, whatever it feels it has to say about the sin.

But there is something profoundly weird about the Stopes. During 2018, the centenary year of the birth of the (homosexual) artist John Minton, an interesting exchange between the pair of them in the letter pages of the old Listener came to light and, hardly surprisingly,  attracted comment.

Writing about Oscar Wilde, Stopes talked of "the abnormal and filthy practices which he had been indulging with stable boys", and went on "one only has to look at the portrait of the gross middle-aged abnormal man in his forties beside the exquisite body and face of the young man in the early twenties ..."

It's all here, isn't it: the risible class preoccupations ('stable boys') ... Ageism ... antifattyism ... the facility with which she sprinkles the word 'abnormal' around ... but, in addition, I think she reveals something rather amusing about her own sexual preoccupations ... poor silly frustrated old woman.

Hardly surprising that Ruggles ... er ...