This past week saw a most dramatic example of self-immolation and self-destruction by an organization supposedly devoted to fund raising to support the fight against cancer, especially women’s breast cancer. The Komen “Run for the Cure”, the brand that brings us pink ribbons on thousands of products, announced it would stop funding Planned Parenthood. You can read a summary with links to the whole sage here: This week in the War on Women: How the pink ribbon catastrophe is all part of the war.
The blowback they experienced on the Internet was nothing short of phenomenal. Not only was it massive beyond belief, it was almost wholly negative.
The bottom line was this. Under the guiding hand of Ari Fleischer, former George W. Bush right hand man, and Karen Handel, the foundation’s senior vice president of public policy, the organization took a hard right politicized decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood. In case you had not noticed in other news, Planned Parenthood has become the radical right wing American Taliban’s replacement whipping boy for Acorn, which they destroyed for voter fraud which it was never guilty of committing. It’s only crime was registering poor and non-white citizens to vote, and as we know, they might vote Democratic. Had to nip that in the bud.
Of course, no one on the right pushing the attack on Planned Parenthood is the least bit interested in the simple fact that Planned Parenthood is responsible for a vanishingly small proportion of their activities and monies spent on abortion. Contraception accounts for 35% of PPFA’s total services and abortions account for 3%; PPFA conducts roughly 300,000 abortions each year, among 3 million people served.
Of course, for the radical anti-abortionists, only one abortion justifies murdering the doctors who perform it. You cannot argue law, morality, or personal freedom with these people. They are the embodiment of evil. The will simply kill you if you refuse to accept their belief system.
The blowback continued unabated for days, until finally the Komen organization issued a non-backdown retraction: Is Komen’s Planned Parenthood Reversal For Real?.
Well, of course it is not for real.
Worst of all is this nugget, buried in their press release.
It is our hope and we believe it is time for everyone involved to pause, slow down and reflect on how grants can most effectively and directly be administered without controversies that hurt the cause of women. We urge everyone who has participated in this conversation across the country over the last few days to help us move past this issue. We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics — anyone’s politics.
If you ever wanted an example of how the right will try to turn themselves into the victim by accusing their critics of doing just what they were caught red-handed doing, look no further than the paragraph above. Komen was the one that injected politics into this, the politics of the far right, the politics targeting the rights of women. But now, suddenly, finding themselves under such fierce criticism, it is, according to Komen, their critics who are trying to inject politics.
I believe the technical term for this is bullshit.
The language of the statement is carefully weasel worded, and very clearly states that Planned Parenthood would have to re-apply, just like everyone else. What we now know, after watching every other statement from this organization for the past week, is that Komen has no intention whatsoever of continuing funds to Planned Parenthood, and every intention in engaging fully in the right wing war on women. Komen had cooked up a rule about not funding any organization under investigation, just so they could then turn it around and apply it to Planned Parenthood, because it was being investigated by the same right wing politicians who are now running Komen. Later they claimed that was not the real reason. For a while, their excuses were changing by the hour.
The Susan G. Komen Foundation has reversed its defunding of Planned Parenthood, at least temporarily, but the falsehoods and hypocrisy haven’t ended. An investigation has revealed that at least four other organizations have received Komen money while under federal investigation, while others have been the subjects of recent investigations, and a lot of the money Komen hands out was provided by sponsors who were also being investigated.
The Komen Foundation hasn’t been leveling with the public. Even its apology was disingenuous.
And then as research into Komen continued, after a few days we saw evidence of Ari Fleischer’s hand emerge from behind the screen as the instigator of this debacle.
Anyone who believes in women’s rights and freedom to choose, and to control their own bodies, and to have access to health care, and continues to donate to Komen, is part of the problem.
What is really fascinating is the stupidity of the right wing nutcakes who believe we need to protect against making fetus soup, who went absolutely nuts on the Komen Facebook site. It just shows how truly fact and reading challenged they are. The announcement is NOT a reversal, it is NOT giving in, it does NOT promise to fund Planned Parenthood. You would think after decades of these lunatics reading between the lines of every dog whistle reference to racism, homophobia, and and class warfare used by their masters to control them, they would have “gotten” it. It just shows how truly out of touch with reality they are. If you do not believe me, just go read their statements on Komen’s facebook page. It is a true sampling of the know-nothingism and militant ignorance that is grinding this nation into the dustbin of history, a little faster every day.
Updated with this link to a later article that just shreds Komen for its constantly changing reasons it has given depending on time of day and direction of the wind, for halting their funding of Planned Parenthood: Komen’s hypocrisy: Let us count the ways.
Well, in the general FWIW if you are interested in looking at some actual facts department, the following graphic illustrates where the money goes for Komen. It is of course pretty not surprising when you get right down to it anymore. It seems like running the long con is part and parcel of being in the power structure nowadays. Everyone does it. Why not an organization supposedly raising funds to help fight breast cancer?
