Some days you learn something new and it floors you. Maybe I missed this in history class but I rather believe that they probably glossed over it, actually it is more likely they did not mention it at all. With a show of hands how many people know about America’s Eugenics program that began in 1907 and continued until 1979? Now in my more angry rants I have as much as said that some idiots should be sterilized so as to free the gene pool from more idiots being born...the difference between me and the U.S. is I was joking.

Yale Study: U.S. Eugenics Paralleled Nazi Germany

But why wouldn’t it when we were so enamored with Germany’s progress keeping its bloodlines pure?

``Germany is perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit,’’ editors of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote in 1934, a year after Hitler became chancellor.

And even the Supreme Court declared it constitutional:

``It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind,’’ Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the majority opinion of a landmark eugenics case in 1926.

But at least Virginia has decided to apologize for forcible sterilization...well, kind of:

Virginia governor apologizes for eugenics law

But a little too late for our war hero Ray Hudlow

On Wednesday in Lynchburg, two state legislators presented a commendation from the General Assembly to eugenics victim Raymond W. Hudlow for his service as a decorated combat soldier in World War II. Hudlow had been sterilized against his will at age 16 because he was a runaway.

Well, that was my Tuesday salute to American history, at least the bits of it I was never taught in school…