News from the Plains: All this RED can make you BLUE
It's not abortion you're after
by Barry Friedman
If Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli falls in the forest and nobody's around, does he make an ultrasound--Lizz Winstead
Last night at a club in downtown Tulsa, I emceed a show on behalf of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, headlined by my old friend.
(In comedy, if you pass someone and say "great set," you're old friends. Lizz and I once sat next to each other at the bar at Dangerfield's in NYC in--we think--1991, nodded and said, "S'up?"; hence the hug in the Green Room last night.)
This event was to help raise money for Planned Parenthood facilities in Oklahoma, for its clinics here receive no state aid on account of their proximity, literally and figuratively, to those organizations which offer abortion services.
Planned Parenthood has been the largest independent contractor with Oklahoma’s WIC program — which provides food vouchers for low-income mothers and their children — for the past 18 years. The Planned Parenthood affiliates in Oklahoma do not perform abortions; rather, they are available to provide preventative care, family planning services, and referrals for abortion services to their low-income clients.
Did you catch that? Food vouchers ... for children, preventative care, and family planning services. Yes, Planned Parenthood refers people to abortion service clinics, but it also provides HIV/AIDS testing and counseling and, surely, that's a distinction state legislators would
make before it decided to end the organization's contract with WIC ... surely a fish bowl full of free condoms at the reception area is not enough to cause Oklahoma's legislators to throw out the baby, the bathwater, the bathtub, the bathroom and then raze the house, block off the street and quarantine the neighborhood.
Well, it's not. (And stop calling me Shirley.)
Monday’s tornado left a lot of devastation in its wake, including the destruction of Planned Parenthood. Granted, the tornado itself had nothing to do with Planned Parenthood, but the Oklahoma Congress sneakily capitalized on its citizens’ distraction to push through a bill that effectively defunds the health organization.
What princes, huh? The state just goes through a horrific event, schools are obliterated, towns devastated, and legislators' first response is to attack and gut an organization that teaches young girls about the importance of regular pap smears?
Ending the WIC contract puts three of the state’s four Planned Parenthood clinics in jeopardy, and some low-income women say they may end up skipping the health services they need if those health clinics remain closed.
This isn't just soulless, it's gutless.
How else to say this? If you support the defunding of Planned Parenthood, relish its desperation, mock its fundraisers, support its critics, disrupt its operations, and pray for its end, you're not against abortion--you're against women.
Lizz Winstead