Up the creek
November 8th 2009 06:51
I just canceled my subscriptions to Planned Parenthood’s and NARAL Pro-Choice America’s online newsletters. If you think reproductive rights are important, I’d advise you to do the same.
They’ve done things that raised an eyebrow in the past. Recently, for instance, they failed to denounce Barack Obama when he made a callous, misogynistic slur about “feeling blue” back during the primaries. But the passage of the Affordable Health Care for America Act, and its language which Democratic Representative Diana DeGette described as “the greatest restriction of a woman’s right to choose to pass in our careers,” represents an abject failure on the part of the organizations who claim to be the flagship of all pro-choice Americans. They were the same ones who urged us over and over and over to vote for Obama, vote for Democrats, because things like this were not supposed to happen.
What did we get instead? The main sponsor of the anti-choice amendment was a Democrat – Bart Stupak of Michigan – and Speaker Pelosi sold out her constituents to win all of one crossover Republican vote. (So much for social conservatives’ concern about “San Francisco values.”) Either Planned Parenthood and NARAL miscalculated, or they lied because they just wanted to shill for Obama. It’s hard to know which is worse.
Pro-choice Americans are at a difficult moment right now. We need to take a deep breath, take a hard look at everything – and then fight like the devil. The outlook is not terrible. The polls are on our side. Time is on our side. The Democratic Party is not, but we’ve beaten them before. And we will again. The war is not over. It’s only beginning.
They’ve done things that raised an eyebrow in the past. Recently, for instance, they failed to denounce Barack Obama when he made a callous, misogynistic slur about “feeling blue” back during the primaries. But the passage of the Affordable Health Care for America Act, and its language which Democratic Representative Diana DeGette described as “the greatest restriction of a woman’s right to choose to pass in our careers,” represents an abject failure on the part of the organizations who claim to be the flagship of all pro-choice Americans. They were the same ones who urged us over and over and over to vote for Obama, vote for Democrats, because things like this were not supposed to happen.
What did we get instead? The main sponsor of the anti-choice amendment was a Democrat – Bart Stupak of Michigan – and Speaker Pelosi sold out her constituents to win all of one crossover Republican vote. (So much for social conservatives’ concern about “San Francisco values.”) Either Planned Parenthood and NARAL miscalculated, or they lied because they just wanted to shill for Obama. It’s hard to know which is worse.
Pro-choice Americans are at a difficult moment right now. We need to take a deep breath, take a hard look at everything – and then fight like the devil. The outlook is not terrible. The polls are on our side. Time is on our side. The Democratic Party is not, but we’ve beaten them before. And we will again. The war is not over. It’s only beginning.
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