3 Generations of Imbeciles

When he was a high school junior, my dopey brother wrote an application to the Virginia state Governor's School about how Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was his intellectual mentor.  It was a pretty clear declaration of his opposition to civil liberties given that Holmes authored the infamous Buck v. Bell decision that upheld the legality of Virginia's forced sterilization law, ostensibly intended for the intellectually and physically impaired but really used to cull those deemed socially and racially undesirable.

It was even more provocative because he was headed to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the place where Carrie Buck worked as a maid and was raped and impregnated by a male member of the family, only to be sent to a state farm for the mentally enfeebled and ordered to be sterilized.

And because the Governor's School was held in Staunton, site of the DeJarnette Sanitarium and Western State Hospital.  Joseph DeJarnette was the enthusiastic architect of the Virginia sterilization law and program who helped inspire the Nazi eugenics effort.  In 1934, he lobbied the state General Assembly to extend the sterilization law to match the Nazis saying, "The Germans are beating us at our own game and are more progressive than we are."