NYT: A Painful Betrayal

[babylonsister]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/opinion/a-painful-betrayal.html?_r=1&hp

A Painful Betrayal
Published: February 2, 2012


With its roster of corporate sponsors and the pink ribbons that lend a halo to almost any kind of product you can think of, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has a longstanding reputation as a staunch protector of women’s health. That reputation suffered a grievous, perhaps mortal, wound this week from the news that Komen, the world’s largest breast cancer organization, decided to betray that mission. It threw itself into the middle of one of America’s nastiest political battles, on the side of hard-right forces working to demonize Planned Parenthood and undermine women’s health and freedom.

snip//

In addition to harming women, the foundation has also tarnished, perhaps permanently, its brand, symbolized by the pink ribbon that adorns yogurt cups and running shoes and tote bags and Federal Premium Ammunition’s pink shotgun shells. Companies like Ford Motor, Dell and Yoplait may not find the same value in identifying themselves with the foundation after its sharp departure from political neutrality.

To try to justify its move, the foundation cited a new policy against making grants to groups under federal or state investigation — in Planned Parenthood’s case, an inquiry into how it spends its taxpayer money by Representative Cliff Stearns, a Republican of Florida. That is just a flimsy fig leaf.

Mr. Stearns’s “investigation” is nothing more than a political witch hunt, stirred up by Republican leaders and by a right-wing antichoice group, Americans United for Life, which now displays the pink ribbon on its Web site as part of a fund-raising campaign for Komen. The inquiry is part of the Republican campaign to stigmatize Planned Parenthood and end financial support for its invaluable network of clinics. Abortions make up only about 3 percent of its work, but most of this crowd also objects to its leading role in providing access to contraceptives.

The Komen foundation should be speaking out against this abuse of Congressional power. At the least, the foundation’s leaders should have the decency and good sense not to do or say anything that even implies an endorsement.

It’s not clear whether this move reflects the political agenda of Komen’s leadership, including its new senior vice president for public policy, Karen Handel, who called for defunding Planned Parenthood during her failed gubernatorial campaign in Georgia in 2010. Perhaps the foundation just caved in to bullying by politicians, although it is not clear why it would have unless it was sympathetic to their cause. Either way, the result is the same: negative fallout for women’s health.

[yardwork]

1. This is part of an all-out assault by Republicans on women and poor people.

"Uppity" women who don't know their place - married to a strong man, barefoot, pregnant, cooking in the kitchen - are the targets. Planned Parenthood is a target because their services, 97% of which are not abortions, help women - especially poor women and young women who don't have high-paying jobs with health insurance, who aren't married to "strong man" with high-paying jobs with health insurance (another myth and stereotype that does nobody any good, this idea that all men are supposed to be married and fathers the breadwinners and carry the weight of the world on their shoulders all by themselves).

This is all about patriarchy flexing its muscles and trying to jam everybody back into the cookie cutter stereotyped lifestyle that some people think everybody else should conform to. This is about imposing a Stepford Wives lifestyle on everybody else.

It turns out that the Susan G. Komen foundation has always been positioned squarely (and I do mean square) in the middle of promoting old-fashioned patriarchy. Wear this pink ribbon honey and don't worry too much about your cancer. It's just a woman's thing.

[bemildred]

2. Damn. So rare to be able to unreservedly support a NYT OpEd. nt

[Arkansas Granny]

3. It's rather ironic, isn't it? It appears that SGK withdrew their funding from PP because

they are an abortion provider. What they don't acknowledge is that by providing the contraception services that they do, Planned Parenthood has probably prevented far more abortions than most of the "pro-life" organizations that demonize them.

[saras]

4. What do you mean 'acknowledge'? They acknowledge that it's evil because voluntary sex is happening

Just because abortions are bad, doesn't mean that preventing abortions is good. That's a kind of logic that doesn't apply to this belief. The belief exists because people are SUPPOSED to be bad, to have out-of-control sex, to get accidentally pregnant, to kill themselves trying to get rid of the embryo, be shamed and humiliated for having sex, getting pregnant, and having the baby, and be forced to devote the next twenty years of their life to raising it, ideally with a rapist stepfather for a dad. This is the NORMAL, CORRECT world, and disrupting it by trying to make it better is WRONG.

They know perfectly well that Planned Parenthood prevents abortions. But they do it wrong. They don't enforce ANY of the moral values specified above, so they are evil.

What part of that is hard to understand - as opposed to disagree with?

Why other people go along with the right-wingers is a different question, and a harder one. In the SGK organization, there have been only a few visible reactions, and those were to quit. If everyone in the organization who disagreed with its new direction had risen on the first day, and all had said "WE'RE NOT LEAVING. YOU LEAVE. YOU'RE ANTI-WOMAN.", well, what would have happened? Anything?

[patrice]

5. I will buy no products of any kind that have anything to do with Komen. nt

[Uncle Joe]

6. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, babylonsister.

[Boombaby]

7. Echoed 100%

[Bill USA]

8. I wonder what other charitable organization meets the same need, so I can not send future donations

to SJK.

recommended

[hay rick]

9. Other organizations:

http://www.nationalbreastcancer.org/

http://www.dana-farber.org/

and, of course-

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/

[Doctor_J]

10. This is just another symptom of the fact that conservativism IS a cancer,

and that the US is completely riddled with it. this evil malignancy is imbedded in every fact of American life, and as killed the US as surely as cancer of the body has killed millions of americans.