5 Reasons Why the GOP Push to Defund Planned Parenthood Won't Go Away

[Shallah Kali]

http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/4485/5_reasons_why_the_gop_push_to_defund_planned_parenthood_won%27t_go_away/


4. Defunding Planned Parenthood satisfies the anti-choice base, but also a more religiously radical part of the base.

While Republicans and anti-choice activists frequently falsely claim that Planned Parenthood's principal mission is performing abortions (in fact 97% of its services are family planning, cancer screenings, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and other medical care), they also suggest that Planned Parenthood should be deprived of federal funding for non-abortion services merely because it does perform abortions. Alternatively, they argue that ending its funding would deprive it of its ability to peform abortions, demonstrating that the right's goal for Planned Parenthood is similar to its goal for ACORN: shutting it down. But beneath these rationales for ending Title X funding for Planned Parenthood is a deeper, religiously motivated goal: ending federal funding for an organization which provides contraceptives, and in particular contraceptives for unmarried people.

Although the Catholic Church officially prohibits the use of contraceptives even for married couples, the National Association of Evangelicals last year published a paper which deemed contraceptive use acceptable for married couples, but (because it opposes sex outside of marriage) not for unmarried couples. But the religious right promotes significant activism, as varied as pseudo-academic papers and popular culture, against the use of contraception even by married couples. The Howard Center on Family, Religion, and Society, a religious right think tank, has called contraception a "war on U.S. fertility," portraying it as crucial step in the decline of western civilization. The Duggars, of TLC's reality show 19 Kids and Counting, have been mainstreamed both by TLC's positive portrayal of their contraceptive-free lifestyle, and by religious right political organizations that depict them as models of American family life. Followers of the biblical patriarchy movement and controversial evangelist Bill Gothard, the Duggars claim that early in their marriage, Michelle got pregnant while on the Pill, and that the Pill also caused a miscarriage of that pregnancy. That claim promotes two religious right myths about the Pill: that it not only doesn't work, but it actually causes harm. Now, instead of using contraceptives, the Duggars say they just "obey" God.

Depictions of the "defund Planned Parenthood" movement as being about "abortion funding" are not only inaccurate, but obscure how the Republican base is made up of activists who, on religious grounds, oppose legal access to abortion and access to contraception.


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lots more info at the link so please click through and read.

Want more information on how the religious right are influencing and creating the GOP's political aims? I suggest these sites:

Religion Dispatches http://www.religiondispatches.org/

Talk2Action http://www.talk2action.org/

Theocracy Watch http://www.theocracywatch.org/

The Authoritarians by Robert Altemeyer http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

Dogemperor's posts at Kos - she was raised in and escaped a religious right "Jesus Camp' childhood: http://dogemperor.dailykos.com/

No Longer Quivering: women who left fundamentalist lifestyles including that like the Duggar family: http://nolongerquivering.com/

[snappyturtle]

1. Mike Pence and I have been 'corresponding' over this issue.

I call him and his supporters the American Taliban. I think that gives a fairly accurate protrayal of their intent to control women. It's interesting that Mike Pence has authored the amendment rider for the current H.R.1 but is also a co-sponsor of H.R. 3. Those along with the Hyde Amendment protects their religiously paranoid base!

[Enthusiast]

2. The right has never

been able to effectively threaten reproductive rights until their plan to "starve the beast" came to fruition.

I about fell off my chair when a Washington Journal caller mentioned the GOP starve the beast policy. Even though Republicans talked openly about this scorched earth policy several years ago, now we never hear about it in the media. Starve the beast is THE reason for the deficits. These deficits were an intentional creation of the right wing.

Spread it around, "These deficits were an intentional creation of the right."

[midnight]

3. Planned Parenthood is a necessity for many women...

We are a wealthy enough country that these clinics can be funded regardless of what it's critics think...