This letter to the editor is in rebuttal to the letter by Mary Ann Dion (“Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan, and Margaret Sanger,” published April 10). It concerns the involvement of Margaret Sanger with the KKK and Hitler’s Nazi Party promoting the extermination of Jews, African Americans, and the poor. Ms Dion says is correct about Ms. Sanger talking to a women’s group of the KKK, as she was willing to talk to any group willing to listen. Note: She did not agree with their philosophy but wanted to promote her Planned Parenthood to be available to “all” poor women. If African Americans actually took umbrage with her ideas, why did Martin Luther King in 1966 agree to accept the Margaret Sanger Planned Parenthood award?

Those who have been and are today against Planned Parenthood have continued to use fake news and photos to try and discredit Ms. Sanger. Fake posters and false quotes such as, “Slavs, Latin and Hebrew immigrants are human weeds…a dead weight of human waste…Blacks, soldiers and Jews are a menace to the race” is one example. Even doctoring photos of a KKK rally by removing their burning cross and substituting her photo in the middle was done to discredit Planned Parenthood.

We tend to think today of Fake News as only being a recent phenomena. It isn’t.

Kevin Young in his book Bunk, states that people have always fallen victim to wanting to believe anything that agrees with their own personal bias. If it disagrees with your bias, then it is either rejected out of hand, or simply dismissed as proof that your bias is correct.

It was my own and my Mother’s personal bias in favor of Ms. Sanger that pushed me into looking up what actually was said and done on SNOPES. I was able to understand what those politically against Planned Parenthood have been up to since Ms. Sanger promoted help for avoiding unwanted children of the poor. If Planned Parenthood is a conspiracy, it isn’t to eliminate any race or religious group, it is to eliminate the forced reproduction of unwanted children. Hence, the anti-contraception and anti-abortion people have used a great deal of fake propaganda to influence the rest of us against any support for Planned Parenthood. It’s as if promoting more unwanted births will strengthen our nation’s democracy but in fact will only provide more poverty, a less educated populous, and more over population. For proof of this, one only needs to look at any developing nation that does not promote birth control for their women, and why they will remain so until women have the right and opportunity to control their own bodies.

Gay S. Johnson

Enumclaw