As Sarah Seltzer notes at Alternet today, part of what has the political and religious right so exercised about the reversal of Komen's decision to defund Planned Parenthood is this: it's very clear that the pushback against Komen's decision to use the health care of poor women as a bargaining chip in partisan political "pro-life" culture war battles came from the American public. Not the media, as some right-wingers are now trying to insist.
Seltzer writes,
Ross Douthat, unsurprisingly, uses his column space to bemoan what he claims is a media erasure of American "pro-life" voices -- but he misses the story that many American women were furious at the decision regardless of their feelings on abortions. Viral videos and stories of women began to pop up talking about how their cancer didn't give a crap about who was in office or who was "pro-life"--and therefore their cancer organization shouldn't either.
Deanna Zandt, who created the Planned Parenthood Saved Me tumblr, has a post explaining who was coming to her site, which was gathering so much steam it hit the mainstream media: "You might think our crazy traffic came from those media mentions. Shockingly, no -- most of the hits came before the major media. So, to repeat: telling and sharing our stories matters," she writes.
The media saw this grassroots outrage growing on one hand -- and then got crickets, or contradictory information from within Komen. And thus, a narrative was born.
In blog discussions of what happened with Komen's decision at the website of my state's weekly independent paper, Arkansas Times, readers have been asking how Komen could have so spectacularly miscalculated--could have misgauged the depth of widespread revulsion at a politically driven decision to use the health needs of poor women as a weapon in partisan culture-war political battles. As a reader points out in this thread discussing that topic, Komen's CEO Nancy Brinker herself noted in her 2010 book Promise Me that Planned Parenthood offers "the only infrastructure available" to many "rural women, poor women, Native American women, many women of color" who are "underserved—if served at all—" by other existing health care structures in the U.S. (See Amanda Terkel on the same point at Huffington Post.)
And so the preceding Arkansas Times reader asks what happened: knowing, as they do, that Planned Parenthood is "the only infrastructure available" for health care provision to many poor women, why did Komen officials choose this past week to try to use the health care needs of poor women as a culture-war political issues to slam Planned Parenthood?
As I've stated previously, when I think about this question, I'm struck by the timing of the Komen announcement: I'm struck by how the decision was announced in the week immediately following the U.S. Catholic bishops' decision to send out letters to be read in Catholic parishes across the U.S., virtually instructing American Catholics to vote against the Obama administration due to its decision about contraceptive coverage in health plans. That letter came after Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he states (falsely) that the Obama administration is requiring Catholics to pay for abortions under the new HHS guidelines.
It came after the USCCB created a template letter to be circulated among all bishops in the country, to be used as the basis for those letters read from the pulpits of Catholic churches across the land two Sundays ago. The Komen decision came, as well, soon after what appears to have been an orchestrated collaboration of the big guns of the liberal Catholic media commentariat piling on the Obama administration following its HHS decision--a campaign discussed in Sarah Posner's article to which my previous posting today links.
In short, Komen made its spectacularly misguided decision to announce that it was defunding Planned Parenthood as anti-Catholic sentiment against the Obama administration (insofar as the sentiment is to be determined by well-placed media blurbs) seemed to be riding very high across the U.S. As the Catholic bishops of the U.S. declared themselves open pro-Republican partisans in the 2012 election cycle. As powerful Catholic beltway media commentators who profess to have Democratic sympathies piled on the bishops along with the Komen foundation. And as those same gentlemen predicted that the Obama administration's decision will spell doom for the administration at the polls in 2012, as Catholics follow their bishops' lead and vote Republican.
Exciting developments these, for Republican strategists who calculate that by playing what is now an extremely tattered hand of the same old anti-abortion cards once again in 2012, they can--with the assistance of the U.S. Catholic bishops and their centrist water-carriers--herd enough voters in swing states to the polls to vote Republican to determine the outcome of the fall elections. So why on earth wouldn't Komen's right-wing "pro-life" Republican top staffers not choose to weigh in precisely when they did, with their decision to defund Planned Parenthood?
As Seltzer's analysis suggests, what all of those calculating to revive the anti-abortion (and anti-Planned Parenthood) talking points once again in the 2012 elections to lead docile Catholic voters to the polls to vote Republican was the possibility of a widespread popular-level revolt against that Komen decision. But that is precisely what they got, and it has now toppled the Komen executive who engineered the partisan political attack on Planned Parenthood, Karen Handel.
This is a development--the immediate and far-flung pushback on one Internet site after another against Komen's decision to throw poor women to the wolves for political reasons--that a number of commentators at Catholic blog sites have been bring to the attention of centrist media gurus who still insist that the bishops are right and Obama wrong vis-a-vis contraceptive coverage. A number of respondents to this thread at America tell Kevin Clarke, for instance, that their social networks exploded with anti-Komen comments immediately following the announcement of Komen's decision. (My social networks lit up, as well.)
All of which explains precisely why those carrying water for the bishops--which is to say, almost all the big-name centrist Catholic media commentators--in this partisan political battle want desperately to keep changing the subject from contraception (which 98% of Catholic women practice at some point in their lives) to the bishops and their religious freedom. From the 98% to the 2%.
It appears to me the centrist powerbrokers are going to have an increasingly uphill climb with their argument that they and they alone represent "the" Catholic viewpoint, now that Komen's cynical little political gambit unexpectedly backfired in such a disastrous way. And they and the bishops have an increasingly difficult task on their hands, as they try to maintain that they alone represent "the" Catholic position about contraception.
Particularly when they continue to place this topic--and the fact that 98% of Catholic women use contraceptives--off the table, even as they say that the entire discussion with the Obama administration hinges on questions of freedom of conscience and the rights of conscience.
No comments:
Post a Comment