Komen's new fashion statement...
...the pink burqa
Jacquielynn Floyd
jfloyd@dallasnews.com
Published: 01 February 2012 03:30 PM
You would have thought an outfit as big, as influential, as respected-bordering-on-sanctified as Dallas-based Susan G. Komen for the Cure would be beyond the reach of one-issue hardball politics.
You’d have thought it, and you would have been wrong.
The nation’s largest breast-cancer charity voluntarily donned the theocratic burqa of anti-abortion ideology Tuesday with its decision to defund Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of reproductive health services.
Their message: We care about women’s health, but only until the organized arm-twisting gets too intense.
Well, the Komen people aren’t the first to scatter like a flock of frightened turkeys in the scary current atmosphere of abortion politics.
That path has been blazed by a steady stream of fraidy-cat politicians rushing to duck the collateral demonization of expressing even the mildest support for Planned Parenthood.
Grants supplied to Planned Parenthood by the well-heeled Komen Foundation paid for an estimated 170,000 breast cancer screenings over the last five years. None of it went toward abortion.
Planned Parenthood has been so frequently targeted over the years for providing abortion services that pregnancy terminations are funded from a non-government-funded budget, separate from such well-woman procedures as pap smears, breast screenings and reproductive counseling.
Nonetheless, Komen is cravenly hiding behind the latest congressional witch hunt to justify cutting these services.
Citing a Florida congressman’s draconian probe into how Planned Parenthood has spent every dime over the last decade, Komen officials bleated about a new bylaw withholding funds from any agency under government investigation.
“Grant-making decisions are not about politics,” a Komen spokeswoman told CBS News in a laughably inadequate response to the furor over Tuesday’s announcement.
I’m hard-pressed to see what else they could be about, since Komen offers no sensible rationale for cutting off Planned Parenthood, which, in some communities, is the only place women have to go for preliminary cancer screenings and mammogram referrals.
Komen, if anybody in these parts didn’t know it, was founded in 1983 by Dallas resident Nancy Brinker to honor her sister, cancer victim Susan G. Komen.
Its marketing and publicity strategies have been phenomenally successful, making it a revered charity-of-choice through its popular footrace fundraisers and winsome pink-ribbon campaigns.
It’s being hinted that the split with Planned Parenthood is a deliberate political right turn by the Komen organization.
Supporters of this conspiracy theory point to the addition of a new senior vice president for public policy: Karen Handel, who ran a 2010 Georgia gubernatorial campaign as an anti-abortion candidate.
Maybe so. But it’s equally possible that, like many others who have caved before them, the Komen people are simply scared, wimping out before the onslaught of yodeling ideologues who want Government Off Our Backs — except when it comes to women’s most private, intimate personal business.
They got bullied into shrinking away from Planned Parenthood by an organized lobbying effort that wants to make the oldest nonprofit reproductive health organization in our nation too radioactive to touch.
Well, it’s Komen’s money. It’s extremely able at raising it, and the charity can distribute the money as it sees fit.
What it doesn’t get to do, however, is dissemble and protest that it’s “not about politics.”
That’s like saying abandoning your post in the heat of battle wasn’t about cowardice — you just had some other place to be.
As much as it would like to sidestep a public pronouncement, the Komen Foundation has chosen sides. It picked the burqa. Until they pulled this bone-headed stunt, I was a big supporter of Komen, too. Very disappointed in those cowards.
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