Stupid Mail

Well, for a start, I'm wondering how a rural French Canadian Catholic Priest would have wielded such influence over a hospital in Calgary as to get them to sterilize, without her knowledge, a young girl he was having an affair with, I mean, what hospital in Calgary at the time was it supposed to have been?  I can't find documentation of there having been a Catholic hospital there at the time and, anyway, I am very doubtful that a Catholic hospital would have performed such an operation.  It would have been at a hospital which was either secular or associated with a Protestant denomination, many of which were not opposed to eugenics, many of the "liberal" and not so liberal Protestants of the day favored eugenics as a supposed means of "improvement".  Though certainly not all of them did.  I do know that very briefly, one of my greatest heroes, the father of Canada's great national health system, the most successful leftist in the history of North America, The Rev. Tommy Douglas, favored eugenics for a brief period, I believe he wrote his thesis on the topic, though he seems to have dropped the idea rather quickly.  Perhaps he knew a theme that would be popular with the educational establishment of the time.  He also had progressive ideas (for his time) about "homosexuality" that it was a disease to treat, not something to imprison people over.  Such was the progress of that period.

I don't know an awful lot about Calgary or Alberta in the late 1930s but as the Catholic Church wasn't influential enough to prevent the enactment of the dreadful eugenics law that is the focus of the play I discussed last night, I doubt a priest would have exercised that influence over non-Catholics who would have performed the operation.  In places where the Catholic church did have that kind of political influence, eugenic laws were generally blocked.  Some of the worst of it was, rather incredibly, blocked by Catholic influence in Britain, though not all of it. 

No, without documentation the play looks like your typical story told by anti-Catholics of the time, many of which are about as ridiculous as the Protocols of The Elders of Zion.  This has the same aroma about it.  Though anyone who wants to find the actual documentation should take up my invitation to produce it.  I always prefer to have credible documentation about historical claims, as opposed to easily most of the theatrical-show-biz concept of "history".  Apparently Betty Lambert's main source of "information" about the story of her play was her mother and Lambert, herself, said her mother said she'd misrepresented the story and was unhappy with the play.   Everyone should be taught in their history classes in school, the very first thing, that plays and novels and TV shows and, especially, movies are entirely unreliable sources of information about history.   About most things, in most cases, actually.