Two events in the last year, involving young conservatives using guerrilla media tactics, have been shortsighted and disgustingly partisan at the expense of the livelihoods of the less fortunate.
The first happened when UCLA student Lila Rose went into a Planned Parenthood with a camera, and a story about statutory rape. The worker told her to lie on her application, and it was all caught on tape. This whipped up the pro-life community (as if they were not whipped up already), and Planned Parenthood took the necessary actions to fire the worker. But, this wasn't enough. The video evidence was used as the reason for revoking funding from some Planned Parenthood locations.
Here's what grinds my gears: the worker at planned parenthood made a mistake, and the worker got fired. This is NO reason to consider revoking funding from such an organization. People who don't want to see planned parenthood on the streets are just looking for that one slip-up to throw the baby out with the bathwater (no pun intended). Lila Rose's ruse turned into a fiasco for reproductive rights and threatened to set us back 35 years. Planned parenthood is not only about abortion. Planned parenthood gives reproductive health counseling, parenthood advice and information about adoption. Abortion consultation is only one element. And, if funding is cut, it affects every aspect of the organization, which could have terrible implications for women seeking reproductive and/or parenthood counseling.
The pro-life movement is incredibly short-sighted and their reasoning is ethically and physically unproven. No one has the right to define where life starts. The argument that it starts at conception is arbitrary and ethically spurious. Ethics aside, other people's reproductive choices are none of their business! How dare someone even consider that they have the power to make decisions about the body of someone else! A woman has an inherent right to choose what she does with the baby that she carries. To pass any kind of law restricting abortion in any term would be an affront to privacy.
The second event involved Hannah Giles, young conservative, who dressed as a prostitute and went into ACORN. An ACORN worker gave her advice on tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution. The worker was fired and the conservative wingnuttosphere went...nutty. ACORN received flak stemming from voter fraud allegations during the election, and many criticisms levied against Obama during his run were stemmed from his work with ACORN. An outraged congress passed a resolution that cut all federal spending from ACORN.
There are two questionable things about the ACORN case. Congress passing a bill that targets ACORN is a bill of attainder and illegal under the constitution. If Congress wanted to cut spending from ACORN, it could have done it without a bill and not made it such a public humiliation for ACORN. If they applied the same rules in the ACORN bill to other federally funded contractors, half of the organizations rebuilding Afghanistan would have their funding cut. I guess the mistake of one worker is worth more punishment than the electrocution of American soldiers by faulty wiring or the rape and humiliation of a woman working for Halliburton. ACORN provides valuable services to underprivileged and underrepresented groups, employing ethnic and racial minorities to get them off the street and out of gangs. They register those communities to vote, train local leaders for social justice grassroots movements and do advocacy for communities that cannot advocate for themselves. And, because of this selfish, unbelievably short-sighted act, all of these programs will lose out. One can surely see the folly in it all.
When the LA Times did a cover story on Ms. Giles and her speech in Santa Barbara to young conservatives, her audience sounded like they were the oppressed minority of the CA political world. Here's some advice from our esteemed governor: Stop Whining! To add insult to injury, Giles had the audacity to quote great community organizer Saul Alinsky. Saul Alinsky was a champion of community organizations and grassroots movements that defined ACORN. If Alinsky were alive, he would have opposed, and probably organized a campaign against what Giles did. I'm sure he's turning in his grave.
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