Were you taken back by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg's recent admission that Roe v. Wade was decided because persons were worried about "populations that we don't want to have too many of"?

Ginsburg's atavistic views can be traced back to the pioneering work of Margaret Sanger, the celebrated American feminist who later founded Planned Parenthood.

Beyond her feverish crusade to convince women to use birth control, Sanger was an unapologetic eugenicist. In her book The Pivot of Civilization she wrote, "More children from the fit, less from the unfit-that is the chief issue of birth control."

In 1934 she wrote her infamous Code to Stop Overproduction of Children that advocated, "no woman should have a legal right to bear a child without a permit. No permit should be valid for more than one child." (Think China's One-Child Policy.)

Nor could there be any doubt about Sanger's genocidal motivations. In 1926 she gave an impassioned speech at a New Jersey KKK rally and later established the euphemistically named "Negro Project." Sanger would later confide to a friend, "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population."

But the long-standing feminist interest in promoting "good births" is not limited to race alone. Feminists regard women, especially white women, as a sort of uber-species, a superior breed of human-beings who are endowed with greater foresight, wisdom, and understanding.

One such advocate is Sally Miller Gearhart, author of The Future - If There is One - Is Female. Here's Miller's uniquely gendered solution to over-population: "The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race." In commemoration of Miller's accomplishments, a fund was later established in her name for the University of Oregon's women's studies program.

Valerie Solanas is another female supremacist. Author of the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, Solanas referred to men as a "biological accident" and called on women to "destroy the male sex." Upon her death in 1988, Solanas was lionized by the president of the New York State chapter of the National Organization for Women as an "outstanding champion of women's rights."

Mary Daly, former professor at Boston College, was one of the early proponents of the "goddess movement," which seeks to replace Christ-centered religion with a polytheistic pantheon that includes Earth Mother, Gaia, and other icons of womanist theology. In 2001 Daly wrote, "If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this process will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males."

But in one of history's supreme ironies, the feminist scheme to "decontaminate" the Earth by weeding out male undesirables backfired. It boomeranged largely due to feminists' own doing. As a result of widespread availability of abortion services and the decision of millions of pregnant women to abort their fetuses on the basis of sex, the lives of millions of unborn girls in India, China, and elsewhere have been tragically snuffed out.

As Charles Dickens once wrote in A Tale of Two Cities: "Every revolution eventually turns on itself."

But most gender supremacists are well-schooled in the methods of soft totalitarianism. They eschew the ham-fisted rhetoric of boot-jacked fascism in favor of kinder, gentler catch-phrases such as "female empowerment" and "gender consciousness-raising."

So rather than engage in a "drastic reduction" of the male population, feminists now implement laws and policies that are designed to incrementally stigmatize and ultimately marginalize men.

Let's start with NPR analyst Cokie Roberts' recent comment, "Men are just lesser beings." That misandrist attitude may be more widespread than persons like to admit.

Once a substantial minority of the populace comes to believe that men are "lesser beings," it becomes easy to jigger policies that make it harder for men to get a fair shake.

Take Obama's stimulus package - remember how the $787 billion was going to create "shovel-ready" jobs, rebuild the infrastructure, and restart the economy? As it turned out, the stimulus package will hire thousands of social workers, nurses, and teachers' aides, allowing women to commandeer 42% of all the new positions, even though four out of five persons who lost their jobs in the recession were male.

Consider the millions of dollars spent for "women's health" programs, even though men die 5 years sooner than women. And ponder the irony of colleges that sponsor "women's studies" programs, while the number of men in higher education continues to dwindle.

So is it far-fetched to countenance the quest for a new Master Race based on neo-eugenic feminist ideology? Columnist Jonah Goldberg offers this terse, if sobering answer in his recent opus: "The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism."
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Carey Roberts has been published frequently in the Washington Times, Townhall.com, LewRockwell.com, ifeminists.net, Intellectual Conservative, and elsewhere. He is a staff reporter for the New Media Alliance.