Blunt Language From Missouri Senator About Abortion

I fully participated in the recent campaign to prevent the move to cut funding to the the organization that prevents more abortions than any other, Planned Parenthood. Even though Republicans held to that partisan budget pittance to the point of shutting down the government, the health services for poor women provided by Planned Parenthood will continue to get that dollar per citizen for another year. Yay. But along the way, I wrote to my Senator, Roy Blunt. Weeks later, he wrote back. Here (in part) is his response:

"Thank you for contacting me about funding for Planned Parenthood"

"I am deeply opposed to the practice of abortion and do not support federal funding for any organization that performs or promotes abortions, which includes Planned Parenthood. An unborn child is a living human being and abortion ends the life of that child. Throughout my time in the House I worked hard to protect the lives of the unborn.

"I am proud to have the highest possible pro-life voting record according to National Right to Life, and, as I begin my time in the Senate, I will continue to support efforts to make adoption more attractive for parents and prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for abortion."

Either he is ignorant, or tacitly lying. Three percent (3%) of Planned Parenthood's activities are abortion related. Of those, none (0%) have ever been taxpayer supported. The prohibition against tax money for abortions is still in effect from the 1976 Hyde Amendment. Only under very rare circumstances does this act allow any federal money to be involved in an abortion. Lawmakers can posture all they want to; it is already illegal for tax money aid poor women who must resort to that tragic choice. I'm not a single-issue voter, nor do necessarily I oppose his position every issue. But his ignorant formula response to my request has cemented my opposition to his reelection.

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Conservatives working hard to increase the number of abortions

Congressional conservatives are working hard to strip all federal funding from Planned Parenthood. What will be the effect? USA Today reports on a study by the well-respected Guttmacher Institute:

Publicly funded family planning prevents nearly 2 million unintended pregnancies and more than 800,000 abortions in the United States each year, saving billions of dollars, according to new research intended to counter conservative objections to expanding the program. The data are in a report being released Tuesday by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health think tank whose research is generally respected even by experts and activists who don't share its advocacy of abortion rights.
Some have characterized this as but one item on an ongoing Republican war on women. I see it as a war on almost everything but warmongering. For instance, the House just voted to de-fund the IPCC, a celebrated international Nobel Prize winning scientific organization providing definitive information about the state of the climate. The $13 million/year federal dollars that supported this organization is the equivalent of the money we waste every hour in Afghanistan.

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Because Sometimes Things Are Forgotten That Shouldn’t Be

This is a completely personal anecdote, so take it for what it's worth. This is about a defining moment for me in my education as an egalitarian. Equality is something we talk about, we assume to be the case for everyone, and never really question. Here, it's the air we breathe. It's not true. We are not all equal. And in spite of our all our lip service to the idea of equality under the law or the equality of opportunity, we all know, if we're honest, that we're still trying to get to that level. Probably it's a function of how well we think our lives are at any given moment. "If I'm doing all right, there's no problem. What are those people over there complaining about? I don't see anything wrong with my life." Well. This is about gender equality. It's one of the most under-considered things in our present world. I saw a PBS special last week about early television and on it Angie Dickinson was talking about her series Police Woman. Breakthrough television. It had been the first dramatic tv show since the mid-60s to be headed by a female in prime time. It was shortly before Charlie's Angels and a decade after both Honey West and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. During the interview, Dickinson commented that the feminists had been angry with her because she hadn't used the show as a statement for the cause. She defended herself by declaring that she was feminine not a feminist---as if being a feminist were somehow a bad thing, a dirty word, a slur. [More . . . ]

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The Hellhound and HeLa: Recent American Historical Writing At Its Best

The last really good history I read was "Hellhound On His Trail, " which follows James Earl Ray's path from his childhood in Alton, Illinois through a violent intersection with the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and continues to follow Ray's trajectory with his quizzical recantations of his "life's purpose." With the same cool hand, Sides sketches the strengths and inadequacies of Dr. King's inner circle and paints larger atmospheric strokes with newspaper headlines on the increasing violence in response to desegregation and the influence of war in Vietnam on national sentiment about federal involvement in heretofore state affairs. By themselves, vignettes about Ray's lackluster career as a petty criminal, his stunted attempts at artistic grandeur and addiction to prostitutes would simply depress the reader. Here, the intentional failures and manipulations of Hoover's FBI and first-hand accounts of Ray's behavior appear like birds descending on a tragic town, flickering across the broader canvas creating momentum and dread. Awful as the true subject of this thriller may be, I found myself disappointed to reach the end.

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