“Leonceg” - Is the 'Planned Parenthood is Racist' line Racist?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/30/971689/-Is-the-Planned-Parenthood-is-Racist-line-Racist

Sat Apr 30, 2011

by leonceg

The religious right and its conservative enablers (and that means you, Rick Santorum) are seeking support among blacks for their anti-Planned Parenthood crusade.  They blame Planned Parenthood for high abortion rates among African American women, calling it a kind of “genocide” against blacks.  A group called Life Always ran grossly condescending billboard ads saying, “Every 21 minutes, our next possible leader is aborted,” that bore a picture of President Obama.  They note that many Planned Parenthood sites are in  minority neighborhoods, but don’t mention that a mere 3% of their services are abortion services.  The other 97% are pregnancy prevention, sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment, breast exams and Pap tests.  Thank the gods they’re in  minority neighborhoods; with all of the preventative health services they provide, they are welcome.  

The religious right and its conservative enablers (and that means you, Rick Santorum) are seeking support among blacks for their anti-Planned Parenthood crusade.  They blame Planned Parenthood for high abortion rates among African American women, calling it a kind of “genocide” against blacks.  A group called Life Always ran grossly condescending billboard ads saying, “Every 21 minutes, our next possible leader is aborted,” that bore a picture of President Obama.  They note that many Planned Parenthood sites are in  minority neighborhoods, but don’t mention that a mere 3% of their services are abortion services.  The other 97% are pregnancy prevention, sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment, breast exams and Pap tests.  Thank the gods they’re in  minority neighborhoods; with all of the preventative health services they provide, they are welcome.  

But let’s look at the group that wants us to ignore all of the services Planned Parenthood provides to minority women.  Life Always is run by Brian Follett, a white, conservative business owner linked to Sarah Palin and  Mike Huckabee.  Black pastors provide cover for the group, but Follett owns it.  It’s only sane to be suspicious when a group (like white, right wing conservatives) with an ongoing history of tolerance for race hatred claims a sudden, overwhelming massa-like concern for little ol’ us.  

Let’s run this down:

•    In recent memory, the right wing religious conservative Governor of Virginia declared a Confederate History Month.  He chose to declare a celebration of treasonous movement founded upon the principle of the rights of white men to, at their whim, buy, sell, kill, rape and maim black men, women and children.

•    According to a mid-April CBS News/New York Times Poll, 45% of Republicans believed the President was born abroad--despite the facts and the voluminous evidence to the contrary.  Almost half of Republicans (that’s the conservative, “Christian” party in case you’d forgotten) considered the black President an illegitimate usurper.  Conservative Fox News, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh and conservative politicians like Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) and Michele Bachmann (R-MN)  have been milking “birtherism” for all it was worth.  Now - finally - even the conservative-deferent Beltway Media is acknowledging birtherism as nothing more than veiled race hatred.  Even conservative David Frum asked, “How did this poisonous and not very subtly racist allegation get such a grip on our conservative movement and our Republican Party?” (Only a willful idiot would even pretend not to know the answer, but you get the point.)

•    The cartoonish Mississippi Governor, Haley Barbour, a bulwark of southern religious conservatism,  recently recalled that Mississippi under Jim Crow “wasn’t that bad,” and praised Klan-associated “Citizens Councils” of the time.

•    A leader of the Orange County Republican party sent an email depicting the President as the offspring of animals.  Among conservatives, this is a veritable chestnut - right up there with “pull my finger.”  To them, it just doesn’t get old.  

•    The head of the GOP in Virginia Beach, Virginia resigned after emailing a racist joke.

•    Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams was expelled from the National Tea Party for a racist letter he sent “supposedly from ‘the Colored People’ to President Lincoln praising slavery.”

•    Rusty DePass a conservative GOP activist and former chairman of the South Carolina state elections Commission suggested on Facebook that Michelle Obama was descended from (you guessed it) a gorilla.

•    Signs at conservative Tea Party events depicted Obama as a witch doctor and accused him of advocating “white slavery.”

•    This is just the very recent past.  Must we be reminded of conservative Republican Trent Lott praising Strom Thurmond’s segregationist policies?  Must we be reminded of the Big Daddy of modern conservatism, Ronald Reagan, opening his presidential bid with a peon to states’ rights near the town in which three civil rights workers were murdered for that cause?  Must we be reminded of the racist “Southern Strategy” which built modern conservatism.

These are the same conservatives who worry that we might lose a “leader,” like the one they regularly vilify as less than human because he’s black.  Odd that this seeming haven for haters turns on a dime and professes its big love for some black babies so bad that they can’t bear to see one negroid blastocyst not be born so they can call it everything short of a “nigger.”  Just seems downright hard to believe.

It’s easier to believe that they discount the black lives saved by Pap tests and breast exams received at Planned Parenthood; how many unwanted pregnancies are avoided through birth control received at Planned Parenthood; how many well black babies result from Planned Parenthood care.  Perhaps somewhere deep down they believe that denying black women the care they need to live healthy lives and bear healthy children has a value.  Perhaps the idea of black women having children they cannot afford to raise well, financially or emotionally will ensure that more of us remain poor, ill, imprisoned, desperate and befitting their bottomless contempt for us, to which they cling so desperately it seems among the things that gives them meaning.