Theologies

“Eugenics and Unitarianism”

Excerpt from Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History by Mark W. Harris, Skinner House Books, 2011

Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood. (Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection By Edwin Black Nov. 9, 2003) 

Jordan never joined a Unitarian church that we’re aware of, but as an adult he took the middle name Starr to indicate his interests in astronomy and to honor his mother’s reverence for Unitarian minister, Thomas Starr King. However, David Starr Jordan was Beacon Press’s best-selling author from 1902-1913. During that period, Beacon published 19 of Jordan's books, more than by any other single author.” http://uudb.org/articles/davidstarrjordan.html

Stanford announced in October 2020 that it would rename campus spaces named for Jordan. 

“The legal highpoint of the eugenics movement was a Supreme Court decision in the case of Buck v. Bell in 1927, where the Court held that state laws permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The decision was largely seen as an endorsement of negative eugenics—the attempt to improve the human race by eliminating "defectives" from the gene pool.

At that time two Unitarian members of the Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and William Howard Taft voted with the majority, with Holmes writing the decision. …Chief Justice Taft, who would soon serve as president of the National Unitarian Conference, was already a supporter of eugenics.”