User blog:Blue in the Red Zone/Some thoughts and links

Conservatives are attacking Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of women's reproductive health services in the country. It's of course a well known, well published ongoing effort. Yet, for all the hooplah, there are parts of the story that just don't seem to be newsworthy, hmm.

I'd probably not have noticed had it not been for some conservative friends on social media. I first became aware of a furor among area conservatives over "free speach" issues at a local University. It seems that professors teaching some "women's studies" and "ethnic studies" classes were requiring their students to assume a subservient roll to students of the studied group durring some classes, to try to teach the emotional impact of discrimination. Worse yet, some of these same Professors were requiring their students to communicate in gender-neutral and ethnically-neutral terms during the class. Some of those same Professors even went so far as to lower student grades for the use of those terms, and even fail students for repeated use of some labels, specificly "illegal alien" in classwork.

Conservatives were of course outraged at this impingement of religious freedom and free speech rights. The University soon capitulated.

Soon, the Conservative furor shifted away from this minor incident to the larger attack on Planned Parenthood. It began with an attack on Margaret Sanger, the founder of the organization which became Planned Parenthood. Sanger was portrayed as a rascist eugenicist and abortionist, and even worse, Hillary Clinton was on record as being an admirer of Sanger. Being me, I had to check it out. What I found was that sure enough there were some recent books and articles that showed Sanger to be at least supporter of racial eugenics. The problem was that these articles all seemed to cite sources which didn't exist. Yes, Margaret Sanger had lectured to a KKK women's auxilliary group, there was even a picture, but there was no evidence that she'd ever supported them. Yes, Margaret Sanger had briefly embraced eugenics. It seems she felt that empowering women in reproductive decisions would benefit humans eugenicly. She also publicly broke with eugenicists over application of their theory. As for the charge that Sanger supported abortion, there's plenty of record of her lectures and writing, and she was adamantly anti-abortion.

Next came release of the first of several undercover videos. The first of videos purported to show a Planned Parenthood Administrator selling baby parts. Now, selling baby parts is not only disgusting, it's also illegal. The problem was, the Administrator thought she was negotiating reimbursement for packing and shipping harvested fetal tissue to a legitimate agency. Shipping human tissue requires special packaging and shipping. It seems the group that made the video was closely associated with the group that made videos of ACORN, another non-profit which provided voter registration for poor people which was attacked and defunded by conservatives in Congress during the last election cycle. It was later proven the makers of the ACORN video had used tactics which landed them in jail, but ACORN was gone by then.

Just as the local furor began to die down, the US House of Representatives took up the debate of removing all funding for Planned Parenthood. The local anti-abortion furor got ramped up al over again.

Then it got more real. The Planned Parenthood facility in the same local University town burned down. That made the local news. When it was discovered that the fire was an arson, it made the local news again. When a security tape was found that showed someone throwing what appeared to be flaming material into the building, the Department of Homeland Security Terrorism people were called in and it made the local news for the last time.

So, what's the problem? Well, there's the problem of the message women get from all of this. There's a large group of young women at the local University who no longer have access to services. But the largest problem is the obvious disparity in media coverage. Some unfortunate teenager takes the clock he built to school and gets questioned and suspended, and his story goes viral and stays in the national news for days. Some crazy with a fire bomb burns down a Planned Parenthood clinic, one that didn't provide abortion, and leaves thousands of young women without services and feeling psychologically supressed, and the National media says nothing.

here's a link if you're interested:  http://politicalconundrum.lefora.com/reply/47228837/WAR-WOMEN-UPDATE-AMERICAN-TALIBAN-vs-PLANNED-PARENTHOOD