August 12, 2002
Compare and Contrast

In 1994, Dr Joycelyn Elders, then the Surgeon General, was fired for saying that masturbation should be taught.

In 1992, Dr. Frederick Goodwin, then the director of the Alchohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration expounded on his racist theory of violence:

If you look, for example, at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence. That is the natural way of it for males, to knock each other off and, in fact, there are some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the same hyper-aggressive monkeys who kill each other are also hypersexual, so they copulate more and therefore they reproduce more to offset the fact that half of them are dying. Now, one could say that if some of the loss of social structure in this society, and particularly within the high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn’t just the careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles, that we may have gone back to what might be more natural, without all of the social controls that we have imposed upon ourselves as a civilization over thousands of years in our own evolution.
He wasn't fired, and there wasn't even a whole lot of flack.

posted by dru in us
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