Lincoln was much better than Mother Teresa

Letter to the editor in yesterday's SF Chronicle:

Inevitable imperfections

What former President Abraham Lincoln said about laws also speaks to the question of whether his, or anyone else’s name, belongs on a school or other public feature:

“The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.”

It would be confusing to name every public feature after Mother Teresa, so if we are to put anyone else’s name on public buildings, we’re going to have to accept the inevitable imperfections of those we honor and, adopting Lincoln’s view, must apply — and continuously reappraise — our best judgment in weighing their achievements against their faults.

Bill Koopman

Palo Alto

Rob's comment:

As the late great Christopher Hitchens pointed out, Mother Teresa was far from perfect:

Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan...

George Orwell’s admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.

Hitchens wrote a book about how immoral Mother Teresa's Catholic fundamentalism was: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

See also God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.