Media watch

The Times Union has a front-page story today, an expansion and rewrite of the AP, headlined Locals greet Komen reversal, concerning reaction to the announcement by "The Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a breast cancer charity, ... that it will continue to fund breast cancer screenings provided by Planned Parenthood, reversing a decision made earlier this week." Three local sources are quoted, all of them Planned Parenthood supporters. Nobody is allowed to put the contrary view, that Komen would be wise to remove itself from the Planned Parenthood connection because that organization is the biggest abortion provider in America, and a lot of people have reasonable moral objections to abortion.

TU blogger Libby Post links the Komen story to the ongoing controversy over the proposed appointment of Thomas Marcelle as Albany County attorney, which Post has led a campaign to derail because of Marcelle's connection to the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund. While most of the opposition to Marcelle has come from a gay rights perspective, Post also focuses on abortion: "That’s how the erosion of rights always starts. A little chip here and a little chip there and before you know it, we’re back in 1950, women are in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant and reproductive choice is relegated to the back alley and a hanger."

The TU's news coverage of the Marcelle brouhaha has been more even-handed  than today's Komen story, and the anti-Marcelle editorial was predictable. "We would have preferred that [Albany County Executive Dan] McCoy had picked a county attorney with more progressive views," says the editorial, which is considerably more restrained than Metroland columnist Miriam Axel-Lute. She alleges Marcelle "is in the employ of an organization that is specifically devoted to undermining one of the most important tenets of our Constitution. That is completely and utterly unacceptable." The italics are in the original.

Axel-Lute's point is that the Alliance Defense Fund seeks to undermine the First Amendment, and seeks to impose its views on people by "removing their autonomy over their own bodies and their legal right to equal protection for their families under law." I think the First Amendment claim is hogwash, but it's the latter sentence that is more radical. She is asserting that anyone opposed to the most expansive definitions of abortion and gay rights, e.g. "Marcelle, and any other employee or supporter of the Alliance Defense Fund, is not fit to hold public office in the United States of America." That's also the logic of the less extreme language in the TU editorial, and seems to me much more of a threat to liberty than anything proposed by the Alliance Defense Fund or its allies.

Comments

[Matthew]

"Nobody is allowed to put the contrary view, that Komen would be wise to remove itself from the Planned Parenthood connection because that organization is the biggest abortion provider in America, and a lot of people have reasonable moral objections to abortion."

Is it outrage over abortion? Or it it outrage over limiting access to cancer screening? Its something to think about.

I bring this up because the same amount of outrage (if not more) occurred when the Obama administration (it was like 5 or 6 months ago) advocated LESS mammographies were needed than they at the rate they currently are.

But regardless, the Komen Foundation really blew it in how they handled this. They could have quietly reduced & withdrew their donations to achieve their new goals but instead they had to make a spectacle about it & make a public splash, making it some grandiose political statement about it. Sure PP does abortion but those Komen donations weren't going towards that anyway, they were going specifically for cancer screenings. So by making that public decision for political reasons, they lost all creditibility of being at the forefront of women's health issues...& basically got nothing out of it because they quickly reversed their decision upon seeing the outrage.

[Brian]

Matthew: using Bob's logic, perhaps Catholics repelled by the Catholic Church hierarchy's complicity in the pedophile priest scandal should stop making donations to their local parish. Sure, their specific donations may not go directly to legal defense for such priests, but it's all being run by the same organization. If all of PP's activities are morally compromised by its practicing of abortion, then, by logic, all of the Catholic Church's activities are morally compromised by its historical protection of abusive priests.

[Matthew]

This controversy (as well as the terribly written SOPA Bill) are great examples of the power of the new media. It was user generated outrage on sites like Twitter & FB that blew the lid off this.

[Bob Conner]

Komen is no more obligated to keep funding Planned Parenthood than donors are to keep supporting the Catholic Church. I think many have ceased donating to the church because of the pedophile priest scandal. The difference is that the pedophile priests and those in the hierarchy who enabled them are scandalous because they violated the tenets of morality as procalimed by the church and others, unlike the practice of abortion by Planned Parenthood, which is a vigorously defended and promoted part of its official agenda.