NY Times Friday editorial: A Painful Betrayal (Komen)
With its roster of corporate sponsors and the pink ribbons that lend a halo to almost any kind of product you can think of, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has a longstanding reputation as a staunch protector of women’s health. That reputation suffered a grievous, perhaps mortal, wound this week from the news that Komen, the world’s largest breast cancer organization, decided to betray that mission. It threw itself into the middle of one of America’s nastiest political battles, on the side of hard-right forces working to demonize Planned Parenthood and undermine women’s health and freedom.
The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that the foundation is cutting off its financing of breast cancer screening and education programs run by Planned Parenthood affiliates. That means nearly $700,000 less for Planned Parenthood, which performed 750,000 such screenings last year, many thousands of them with money from the Komen foundation.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York pledged to match up to $250,000 for Planned Parenthood, a generous move, although it addresses only one year’s financing. There was also an outpouring of support from small donors.
In addition to harming women, the foundation has also tarnished, perhaps permanently, its brand, symbolized by the pink ribbon that adorns yogurt cups and running shoes and tote bags and Federal Premium Ammunition’s pink shotgun shells. Companies like Ford Motor, Dell and Yoplait may not find the same value in identifying themselves with the foundation after its sharp departure from political neutrality.
To try to justify its move, the foundation cited a new policy against making grants to groups under federal or state investigation — in Planned Parenthood’s case, an inquiry into how it spends its taxpayer money by Representative Cliff Stearns, a Republican of Florida. That is just a flimsy fig leaf.
Mr. Stearns’s “investigation” is nothing more than a political witch hunt, stirred up by Republican leaders and by a right-wing antichoice group, Americans United for Life, which now displays the pink ribbon on its Web site as part of a fund-raising campaign for Komen. The inquiry is part of the Republican campaign to stigmatize Planned Parenthood and end financial support for its invaluable network of clinics. Abortions make up only about 3 percent of its work, but most of this crowd also objects to its leading role in providing access to contraceptives.
The Komen foundation should be speaking out against this abuse of Congressional power. At the least, the foundation’s leaders should have the decency and good sense not to do or say anything that even implies an endorsement.
It’s not clear whether this move reflects the political agenda of Komen’s leadership, including its new senior vice president for public policy, Karen Handel, who called for defunding Planned Parenthood during her failed gubernatorial campaign in Georgia in 2010. Perhaps the foundation just caved in to bullying by politicians, although it is not clear why it would have unless it was sympathetic to their cause. Either way, the result is the same: negative fallout for women’s health.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/opinion/a-painful-betrayal.html
Komen is ruined, but some like Handel will walk away with fantastic golden parachutes and be paragons of the Right (and Fox News). Wonder where the Kochs are in all of this?
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