The Case for Reparations

By Tom Quiner

On a recent trip to Angola last December, President Biden suggested that the issue of slave reparations deserves further study. Just last week, House Democrats reintroduced a bill calling for reparations for descendants from slaves. Last summer, I attended the Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis at which the co-host of EWTN’s Morning Glory show, Gloria Purvis, suggested the same thing. (You may recall that Ms. Purvis was the keynote speaker at the Pulse Christmas Gala a few years ago.) Let me make the case for reparations, although it might not be what you think.

Slavery

Here is the challenge: no one living today was a slave holder. Nor were their parents or even grandparents. Probably not even their great, great grandparents.

Take my great, great grandfather, Joseph Carpenter Quiner. He was born in 1834. He enlisted as a Union solider in the Civil War, serving in Company B, 16th Infantry Regiment in Wisconsin. He died in Tennessee on April 28, 1862 as a result of wounds suffered in the Battle of Shiloh. This was one of the bloodiest battles in the war, with 24,000 casualties on both sides.

Why were they fighting? Great, great, Grandpa Quiner was fighting to free the slaves. He died for his efforts.

We can’t duck the political element of this pox on our Democracy. One party, the Democrats, supported slavery. The other side, the Republicans opposed.

You can see the dilemma. Why should the heirs of those who died in battle fighting to free the slaves pay reparations some 162 years latter?

The Democrats in the South felt so strongly about their position that they sacrificed the lives of some 490,309 young soldiers who died in their fight to preserve slavery.

The Republicans in the North felt so strongly that slavery was evil that they sacrificed 590,670 young soldiers, including my great, great, Grandpa Quiner, in the name of restoring our citizens’ fundamental right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

If reparations are a good idea, they should be paid by the oppressors, not the liberators.

Eugenics

As the U.S. grappled with the aftermath of the Civil War, the 20th century presented the country with another racist and toxic ideology: eugenics. Eugenics was a movement to “improve human heredity by the social control of human breeding.” One of the movement’s biggest proponents was Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger. 

The progressives pushing eugenics found a home in the Democratic Party. They had a particularly noxious view of the Black race, as expressed by their leader, Richard T. Ely, who taught at Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin:

“Negroes, are for the most part, grownup children, and should be treated as such.”

The progressive movement viewed these former slaves as “inferior” and “unemployable.” 

Ms. Sanger explained her views about eugenics in the New York Times April 8th, 1923 edition:

“It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation (destruction) of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

Sanger launched the “Negro Project” in 1939, an outreach intended to control and limit America’s Black population.

The Sanger legacy grew within the Democratic Party with the founding of Planned Parenthood. The prestigious Margaret Sanger Award went to a number of luminaries of the Democratic Party, including former president Lyndon Johnson, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi.

In 2015 in acknowledgement of Sanger’s racist legacy, Planned Parenthood of New York distanced themselves from their founder and expunged her name from their clinic.

Abortion

With the Roe v Wade decision in 1973, Planned Parenthood’s mission devolved from one aimed at family planning to one laser-focused on the more lucrative abortion model.

Generally, Democratic politicians have supported legal abortion while Republicans oppose it.

Democratic legislators have used their clout to give roughly a half billion dollars of taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood each year. The impact of abortion on the Black community has been catastrophic.

A thousand Black babies are aborted each day on average.

Black women get abortions at a rate 3.5 times higher than white women; 30% of all abortions are Black women even though they represent but 12.6% of the population.

Although the average Black woman averages 1.6 more pregnancies than White women, theirs are 5 times more likely to end in abortion.

Blacks’ share of the U.S. population is dropping as the Black birthrate has fallen well below replacement, largely due to abortion. 

One party, the Democratic Party, not only supports abortion-on-demand, but even opposes ANY regulations on abortion, as we saw in the last election cycle, to the detriment of Black America.

The Great Society

Fast forward a hundred years from the Civil War. In an effort to redress past sins, Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, successfully launched an expansive (and expensive) social welfare program called The Great Society.

The Democratic Party had just won massive landslide victories in the 1964 election cycle, with a 259 to 176 seat advantage in the House, and a veto-proof 68 to 32 seat advantage in the Senate.

I’m amazed at how many younger people are unfamiliar with the term. The Great Society was a ‘war on poverty’ launched in 1965 to, in the words of President Johnson, “to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty.”

Today, this ‘war on poverty consists of 80 welfare programs with a historic price tag of $22 Trillion (with a capital T)! As the Heritage Foundation points out,

“Adjusted for inflation, this spending (which does not include Social Security or Medicare) is three times the cost of all U.S. military wars since the American Revolution.”

The big question is: did it work?

Did this massive transfer of taxpayer’s money to erect a massive social safety net improve the lives of Black Americans? After all, around half of all Black families receive some sort of payment from one of these myriad Great Society programs.

According to the Heritage Foundation, the answer is no:

“… progress against poverty, as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau, has been minimal, and in terms of President Johnson’s main goal of reducing the “causes” rather than the mere “consequences” of poverty, the War on Poverty has failed completely. In fact, a significant portion of the population is now less capable of self-sufficiency than it was when the War on Poverty began.”

Why? Because too many programs replaced the father of the family with a welfare check. The out-of-wedlock rate for Black families skyrocketed from 24% at the time of the inception of the Great Society Programs to roughly 80% today. The fatherless home is the engine that drives social pathology, regardless of skin color.

When a Republican congress led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich attempted to moderate some of these counter-effective programs, Democrats pushed back hard. President Bill Clinton vetoed two such bills in 1996. A third bill finally got passed which placed work requirements and time limits on government benefits, reducing enrollment for dependency programs by 60 percent. According to the driving force of this bill, Newt Gingrich, incomes increased by 25 percent and childhood poverty dropped at a record pace.

When Democrats regained the White House, President Obama gutted the work requirement through a policy directive through the Department of Health and Human Services.

Slavery. Eugenics. Abortion. The Great Society. Each of these toxic ideas devastated the African-American community in terms of loss of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  The Black family is a shell of what it once was.

The wrong side of history

Each issue pitted Republicans against Democrats. And on each issue, Democrats came down on the wrong side of history, which brings us back to the issue of reparations.

IF honorable people believe that reparations are the honorable solution to the racial discord that has rocked our Republic since its inception, then honorable people should hand a promissory note to the political party that has opposed the rights of this country’s great African-American community every step of the way.

In that light, the case for reparations may not be that bad of an idea. I think great, great grandpa Quiner would agree.

[Tom Quiner is board president for Pulse Life Advocates. To support our pro-life outreach, donate NOW.]