SCOTUS and the Free Exercise Clause
Posted: February 9, 2012 Filed under: religion, religious extremists, right wing hate grouups, SCOTUS 42 Comments
A large portion of my family--Jewish and French Huguenot people from Alsace Lorraine also known as the Rhinelands–came over to the British colonies because their homes, lives, businesses and farms had been handed to the Catholic Church as part of hundreds of years of persecution by the state of France and its state religion. Many had fled to other places–specifically England–as the persecution of French Protestants and Jews was extraordinary in the late 1600s during the Nine Year War. This was nothing new since it also occurred in the 16th century. It was still occurring under Cardinal Richlieu and Louis XIII. French Protestants (Huguenot) and Jews did not really receive full rights in France until the establishment of the Napoleonic Code in 1804. The stories of these horrors were handed down in my family from generation to generation along with the pride all felt in being early American colonists who participated in the writing of the Constitution and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I grew up with a strong sense of what religious persecution meant as well as what was behind the so-called Free Exercise Clause of the US Constitution. It’s been burned into our family memory. While not a lawyer myself, I come from an extremely long line of barristers and lawyers. My uncle argued a lot of constitutional cases for the Roosevelt administration. I grew up with huge debates around family tables. I have spent the last few days completely distraught about the recent suggestion that a birth control provision for hospitals, universities, and other organizations run by the Catholic Church smacks of religious persecution. It simply does not represent the truth of the Supreme Court findings on what is and is not “free exercise” and what the government can and cannot regulate when it comes to religious institutions, practices and believers.
There seems to be a raging misunderstanding in the press right now about what constitutes separation of church and state and free exercise of religion. It is extremely bothersome to me because the free exercise clause and its meaning is well established. There is very little ambiguity about what it is and what it is not.
In 1878, the Supreme Court was first called to interpret the extent of the Free Exercise Clause in Reynolds v. United States, as related to the prosecution of polygamy under federal law. The Supreme Court upheld Reynolds’ conviction for bigamy, deciding that to do otherwise would provide constitutional protection for a gamut of religious beliefs, including those as extreme as human sacrifice.
The Court stated that “Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious beliefs and opinions, they may with practices.”
This ruling has stood the test of time. It continued to be applied in the 1960s under the Warren Court. There were some decisions that moderated the original finding that come under the heading of “accommodation”. Oddly enough, the free exercise clause narrowed again in the 1980s and Antonin Scalia was one of the driving forces. In the 1990 case of Employment Division v. Smith. the court found that a law against peyote use was fine even though it had a religious use by some Native Americans. A 1993 law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was passed in order to broaden the interpretation. However, many parts of that law were struck down as unconstitutional. Here are a few examples of cases that didn’t pass muster with SCOTUS. Now remember, by the time these cases came up in the late 1990s, the court had clearly shifted to the right.
In the case of Adams v. Commissioner, the United States Tax Court rejected the argument of Priscilla M. Lippincott Adams, who was a devout Quaker. She tried to argue that under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, she was exempt from federal income taxes. The U.S. Tax Court rejected her argument and ruled that she was not exempt. The Court stated: “…while petitioner’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened by payment of taxes that fund military expenditures, the Supreme Court has established that uniform, mandatory participation in the Federal income tax system, irrespective of religious belief, is a compelling governmental interest.”[15] In the case of Miller v. Commissioner, the taxpayers objected to the use of social security numbers, arguing that such numbers related to the “mark of the beast” from the Bible. In its decision, the U.S. Court discussed the applicability of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, but ruled against the taxpayers.[16]
For some time, members of specific religious communities–like Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Quakers, and the Catholic Bishops–have taken cases to the Supreme Court based on the Free Exercise clause and lost. This is why I am so confused by the complete lack of understanding in the TV Press of the current attack on birth control coverage in the HCRA. Since I am not a lawyer and have only had undergraduate classes in constitutional laws, I will defer to some one who is a well known constitutional lawyer, David Boies. He has been appearing on The Last Word show and has calmly explained why all the hysteria about free exercise of religion is just that; badly motivated hysteria.
The high, in terms of reason and clarity, came from famed attorney David Boies on MSNBC’s “The Last Word.” Lawrence O’Donnell has let male “liberal” pundits like Mark Shields wax a little shrill on his show, but to his credit, he offered the best rebuttal to all the shrieking I’ve seen so far: Boies calmly and clearly explaining the new regulations as an issue of labor law, and the government’s regulation of employers (relatively minimal, compared to other countries) on issues of health, safety and non-discrimination.
I’ve tried to make the same points: What if Catholics didn’t believe in child labor laws? Would we let church-run agencies flout them? Boies used the example of a religion that believed people shouldn’t work after age 60: Could they legally ban older people from employment? Of course, they could do neither. This is indeed an issue of religious freedom: the freedom of non-Catholics not to be bound by the dictates of the Catholic Church in the workplace.
But Boies, fresh off his 9th Circuit victory defending gay marriage, brought the legal knowledge.
Lawrence O”Donnell writes directly about this conversation.
Constitutional expert David Boies said there’s no basis for a constitutional fight with the birth control mandate. On The Last Word, he compared the current debate that’s heating up in Washington to simple tax law or labor laws.
“There isn’t a constitutional issue involved in this case,” he told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday. “You don’t exempt religious employers just because of their religion. You are not asking anybody in the Catholic church or any other church to do anything other than simply comply with a normal law that every employer has to comply with.” Boies, who represented Vice President Al Gore in Bush v. Gore, said “this case would have trouble getting to the court.”
So, I have one other reason that I’d like to bring all this up. We know that a few specific religious groups have a problem with Roe V. Wade and Griswold V Connecticut. We know that these people have been trying to stack the courts with sympathetic whackos for about 40 years now. It seems they’re attacking Reynolds too. If you read BB’s morning post and Peggy Sue’s last post you can see that many Republicans would just like to outlaw the judicial branch. Newt Gingrich makes it a campaign staple.
Did you know that THREE of the SCOTUS justices turn 80 in the next five years? Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy are the three justices. So, let’s think about what is at stake if any of these Republican presidential wannabes get to appoint a SCOTUS or three. How about major appointments to courts like the one that just overturned Prop 8?
Thursday Reads: Male Politicians and Pundits should Worry about their “Erectile Dysfunction” and STFU about Women’s Health (and Other News)
Posted: February 9, 2012 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, morning reads, religious extremists, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics, Team Obama, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: autonomy, Birth Control, chastity belt, Chris Matthews, contraception, EJ Dionne, history of birth control, Mark Shields, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, privacy, Rick Santorum, sponges, Tim Kaine 50 Comments
Morning News by Ellen Day Hale (1855-1940)
Good Morning!
I thought this painting was appropriate, since we are being dragged back into the 19th Century by both Democrats and Republicans these days. We all know about the war on women being waged by Willard “Mitt” Romney, Rick “the Dick” Santorum, Nasty Newt Gingrich and Ron “White Power” Paul. But Democrats have now been empowered the Catholic Church’s attack on Obama’s attempt to protect women’s health care.
But now “liberal” pundits like Chris Matthews, Mark Shields, and E.J. Dionne have joined the battle to remove any semblance of privacy and autonomy from women.
Today former DNC Chairman and Governor of VA–and likely Senate candidate Tim Kaine came out against the requirement that contraception be included in health insurance policies.
Pat J is right. We need a women’s freedom party. Aren’t any of these dinosaurs aware that birth control (and abortion) have been with us during most of recorded history? Check out this series of photos in Newsweek drawn from the history of birth control.
Did you know that Aristotle recommended birth control methods for women in the 4th Century BC?
The philosopher recommended that women “anoint that part of the womb on which the seed falls” with olive oil in order to prevent pregnancy. His other top picks for spermicides included cedar oil, lead ointment, or frankincense oil. If the lips of the cervix were smooth, he noted, then conception would be difficult.
Sponges used for contraception
Ancient Egyptian women used sponges.
Long before Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes weighed the merits of a man to determine his spongeworthiness, women were using sponges as a method of preventing pregnancy. The sponge has its roots in early Egyptian civilization, and this photo depicts the variety of models available in the early 20th century. Those sponges were made of a variety of materials, and were sometimes drenched in lemon juice or vinegar to act as a spermicide. Today’s sponges (called, in fact, Today’s Sponge) are synthetic, and use a chemical spermicide.
Another early method was the chastity belt. Perhaps religious nuts like Rick Santorum and Mark Shields would find that one acceptable?
At Wonkblog, Sarah Kliff thinks the Obama administration “sees political opportunity in the contraception battle,” because of the data shown in this chart:
(Public Religion Research Institute)
Kliff writes:
while Catholic leadership has blasted the new regulation, polls show that a majority of Catholics are actually more supportive of the provision than the rest of the country. A poll out Tuesday from the Public Religion Research Institute finds 52 percent of Catholic voters agreed with the statement, “employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.” That’s pretty much in line with overall support for the provision, which hovers at 55 percent – likely because Catholics use contraceptives at rates similar to the rest of Americans.
A majority of Catholics – 52 percent – also agree with the Obama administration’s decision to not exempt religious hospitals and universities from the provision. “Outside the political punditry, most Catholics agree with the administration on the issue,” says one Obama campaign official, explaining the view that this could be a political win.
And a lot of this likely isn’t about Catholic voters at all.
Rather, it may well be about the demographics that are most supportive of this particular health reform provision: young voters and women. In the PRRI poll, both groups register support above 60 percent for the provision.
Those two demographics are important here for a key reason: they were crucial to Obama’s victory in 2008. Third Way crunched the numbers earlier this month and found that the “Obama Independents” — the swing group that proved crucial to his 2008 victory — are, as Ryan Lizza put it, “disproportionately young, female and secular.”
Let’s hope Obama keeps all that in mind instead of bending to the will of the old gray white male Catholic Bishops and the elderly male fake-liberal pundits who won’t STFU and let women make their own choices.
Even some of the saner folks in the GOP are warning their wingnut colleagues that a fight against contraception would be a “disaster” for their party.
Blowback against Specific acts of Religious Intolerance seeking legal status is not a War against Religion
Posted: February 8, 2012 Filed under: 2012 primaries, religion, religious extremists, right wing hate grouups, science, U.S. Politics 10 Comments
For a group of people obsessed about the possibility that Shari’a law might creep into US Law, christofascists sure seem to thrive on forcing their own brand of it. All the while, there’s this claim of a “war against religion”. Forcing other people to suffer from unjust and unconstitutional laws in the name of religion is not the kind of religious freedom the founders had in mind when they penned the first amendment. Religious status does not give any person or institution the ability to ignore law. Asking for enforcement of law against narrow religious doctrine does not constitution a war against religion. Our country is not suppose to favor any one religion or enshrine its pet biases into law. However, it seems every major Republican candidate hates our Constitution. How can these people truly seek an office where they are sworn to uphold it yet desire to twist the Age of Reason right out of it?
These are the same folks that have declared jihad on women’s reproductive health, science, and mathematics. Yes, remember Copernicus who had the audacity to discover that the earth revolved around the sun JUST, FINALLY got a proper burial in 2010. It only took him 600 years and hundreds of years of science to get his ticket out of hell for heresy. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum–who swept a round of beauty contests with record low turnouts–is still proving there are people out there that probably think that Galileo and Copernicus are wrong. Galileo got his apology in 1992 nearly 600 years after his death. He died in 1642. Let’s not forget the persecution and stalking of Jean-François Champollion whose Rosetta stone proved that Egypt had existed straight through the supposed dating of the great flood. That’s just a few examples from science. The use of religious texts to support slavery, ownership of all married women and children, persecution of GLBT populations around world, and wars and acts of terrorism is omnipresent. Standing against these things and creating laws to make them illegal does not mean you’re against religion. It means you are for the constitutional separation of church and state and ensuring the basic constitution granted rights of all individuals. No one’s “God” wrote the Constitution. Men afraid of religious dictatorships and intolerance did.
Why wouldn’t rational, freedom loving people want to stop the creep of christofascist biblical law wherever possible? It’s not a war against religion. It’s blowback against those who are trying to force narrow religious doctrine onto the rest of us and into law. Luckily, even Antonin Scalia has written about the complete unconstitutionality of all this.
As conservative (and Catholic) Justice Antonin Scalia explained in a Supreme Court opinion more than twenty years ago, a law does not suddenly become unconstitutional because someone raises a religious objective to it — if this actually were true, anyone at all could immunize themselves from paying taxes or from any other law simply by claiming they have a religious objection to being a law-abiding citizen.
We have all just about had it with the Catholic Bishops, Pat Robertson, and all that crap that seems to have come to culmination in the candidacy of Rick Santorum. Where’s that trademarked Santorum outrage about Cardinal Edward Egan who withdrew his apology for illegally covering up instances of pedophilia on his watch? Nope, don’t wait for it. Santorum’s too busy insisting that President Obama wants to force the Catholic Church to accept women priests. The one thing that I’ve really learned in this primary election is that Republican politicians feel so emboldened by the current hatefest in the base that they will lie about anything and know that Fox News will repeat it every chance they can.
For weeks, Republicans have pretended that President Obama is waging some kind of war on religion because his administration recently approved regulations requiring insurers to cover contraceptive care — spurred on in large part because the conservative U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposes the contraceptive care regulations. Their claim is utterly absurd. The new rules exempt churches from the requirement to offer insurance that covers contraception. And they align closely with the beliefs of actual Catholics, 58 percent of whombelieve that employers should be required to provide insurance that cover contraception.
On Fox News this morning, GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum doubled down on this bizarre claim that Obama is going after religion — falsely claiming that the president wants to tell Catholics who they can hire as priests:
What they’ve done here is a direct assault on the First Amendment, not only a direct assault on the freedom of religion, by forcing people specifically to do things that are against their religious teachings. . . . This is a president who, just recently, in this Hosanna-Tabor case was basically making the argument that Catholics had to, you know, maybe even had to go so far as to hire women priests to comply with employment discrimination issues. This is a very hostile president to people of faith. He’s a hostile president, not just to people of faith, but to all freedoms.
Again, if the first amendment was really serious about that then as a Buddhist, I’d like all my war tax money back now. I’d also like to argue that Rastafarians should be allowed all the legal pot they want for their sacraments. Then, let’s just go back to letting all those Mormons have multiple child brides. Religious organizations do not get to exempt themselves from laws. Again, check the Scalia reference above.
The deal is that Santorum and the Bishops and some of these other full time misogynists posing as Pharisees have had trouble with every law that’s given women the ability to make adult decisions about their own selves. This includes the SCOTUS decision giving women the constitutional right to birth control and abortion. Ron Paul has pretty much said that he doesn’t believe it’s possible for a husband to rape a wife. That falls under the laws that existed in this country prior to 1882 when women were literally written in as an appendage of the husband. Married women were not considered separate individuals which is why in many states they couldn’t own property.
It gets worse. Paul hangs around with Christian Reconstructionists. These folks are truly scary.
Reconstructionism, the right-wing religious-political school of thought founded by Rousas John Rushdoony. The ultimate goal of Christian Reconstructionists is to reconstitute the law of the Hebrew Bible — which calls for the execution of adulterers and men who have sex with other men — as the law of the land. The Constitution Party constitutes the political wing of Reconstructionism, and the CP has found a good friend in Ron Paul.
When Paul launched his second presidential quest in 2008, he won the endorsement of Rev. Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist pastor who travels in Christian Reconstructionist circles, though he is not precisely a Reconstructionist himself (for reasons having to do with his interpretation of how the end times will go down). When Paul dropped out of the race, instead of endorsing Republican nominee John McCain, or even Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, Paul endorsed Constitution Party presidential nominee Chuck Baldwin (who promised, in his acceptance speech, to uphold the Constitution Party platform, which looks curiously similar to the Ron Paul agenda, right down to the no-exceptions abortion proscription and ending the Fed).
At his shadow rally that year in Minneapolis, held on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Paul invited Constitution Party founder Howard Phillips, a Christian Reconstructionist, to address the crowd of end-the-Fed-cheering post-pubescents. (In his early congressional career, Julie Ingersoll writes in Religion Dispatches, Paul hired as a staffer Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist leader and Rushdoony’s son-in-law.)
At a “Pastor’s Forum” at Baldwin’s Baptist church in Pensacola, Florida, Paul was asked by a congregant about his lack of support for Israel, which many right-wing Christians support because of the role Israel plays in what is known as premillennialist end-times theology. “Premillennialist” refers to the belief that after Jesus returns, according to conditions on the ground in Israel, the righteous will rule. But Christian Reconstructionists have a different view, believing the righteous must first rule for 1,000 years before Jesus will return.
They also believe, according to Clarkson, “that ‘the Christians’ are the ‘new chosen people of God,’ commanded to do what ‘Adam in Eden and Israel in Canaan failed to do…create the society that God requires.’ Further, Jews, once the ‘chosen people,’ failed to live up to God’s covenant and therefore are no longer God’s chosen. Christians, of the correct sort, now are.”
Responding to Baldwin’s congregant, Paul explained, “I may see it slightly differently than others because I think of the Israeli government as different than what I read about in the Bible. I mean, the Israeli government doesn’t happen to be reflecting God’s views. Some of them are atheist, and their form of government is not what I would support… And there are some people who interpret the chosen people as not being so narrowly defined as only the Jews — that maybe there’s a broader definition of that.”
Again, if you hang around folks that basically want to tear apart the constitution and insert their own religious views in place of secular law, you’re not a conservative. You’re not a libertarian. Hell, you’re not even really supporting our Constitution and basic shared American Values. Again, these are the people that say there is a religious war because they’ve basically started one. They and their Republican Toadies need to be stopped.
I wont even get into the Romney/Mormon thing because BostonBoomer has already covered a lot of that. These are not just simply pious folks that you meet at your local church potluck. They are all fanatics and they deserve all the blowback we can muster. It would be one thing if they all weren’t so politically active and they didn’t have such a huge impact on one political party. Again, this isn’t just the practice of religion, this is the practice of a zealotry akin to political terrorism. We need to recognize and call it exactly that before our rights are crushed by their very narrow interpretations of what’s science, what’s American, and what’s moral.
Reversal of Fortunes: How to kill your cash cow the Komen way
Posted: February 3, 2012 Filed under: abortion rights, religious extremists, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: Piinkwashing, Radical Right Activists, Susan G. Komen 29 Comments
Schools that teach marketing for nonprofits will undoubtedly use the recent Komen debacle as a case study in how to radically change your brand for worse in a matter of hours. Komen’s decision to defund breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood has turned into an example of mismanagement as well as mangled message. Komen was fairly well known by those that care as an institution more interested in marketing than its mission. The ill-timed decision has undoubtedly brought some of its worse decisions out into the light of day. My guess is that Komen will not be able to put its Humpty Dumpty foundation back together again. Here are some of the reasons why.
Komen was in such a hurry to please some of its new associates that it obviously didn’t plan its response or gauge the backlash. It underestimated the power of women and the power of social networking. This comes when you listen to only one side and the Komen organization appears to have been listening to right wing advocates that were more concerned about their own personal agendas than Komen’s broader mission. They hired women that were part and parcel of the current war on women who pushed until Komen’s board broke. This should demonstrate that you really need to be careful with whom you climb into bed.
As heartening as the outpouring and the reversal has been, and as satisfying as it’s been on some level to watch Komen’s PR strategy implode, the initial decision is still bad news, and it comes after a year of bad policy. One of the primary items on the right-wing agenda since the GOP swept into Congress in 2010 has been to isolate, ostracize, harass and shame Planned Parenthood. They’ve tried to de-fund it at the federal and state levels and launched a bogus investigation. Planned Parenthood and all abortion providers are part of a never-ending paranoid obsession. Many bloggers have been comparing it to the Salem, Massachusetts hysteria, the kind of witch-hunt that taints everyone by association.
They’ve already succeeded in making abortion a pariah among medical procedures, the only one not funded by Medicaid, the only one hushed up and shunted aside. Now they’re trying to extend that blacklist to Planned Parenthood, and backlash aside, Komen’s move shows that this relentless campaign has met with some success.
Komen’s board must’ve become progressively insular. This is something that is ill-advised when you’re a service organization that relies on the donations of a broad group of donors. They removed their democratic lobbyist and lost their primary scientist. By doing this and hiring right wing activist and Quitterella pal, Karen Handel, Komen sealed their fate. No amount of protesting about the “unpolitical” nature of the defunding decision takes away the well-documented change in direction. The press have found smoking pink guns in less than 48 hours.
Before Handel’s hiring, Komen’s lobbying shop was staunchly Democratic — from its head to its hired guns, former Democratic aides did most of the heavy lifting on everything from the breast cancer stamp to breast cancer research to its advocacy on the health care bill. And when their lead lobbyist, former Democratic staffer Jennifer Luray, quietly left in 2010, she took with her a six-figure severance package not in keeping with an employee that just found a new job.
At the time Handel was hired as a consultant — shortly after Luray left — Handel told the local magazine Northside Woman that Komen was her first and only client, and that her role was to “[work] with [the affiliates] to make sure they are as strong as they can be,” adding, “we’re making sure there’s a good relationship between the national group and the affiliate group [sic].” She told the Atlanta Trend last year, “Everybody understands that budgets are really, really tight in virtually every state. And that means that every program, no matter how worthwhile, is on the table to be scrutinized.” That would seem to belie Komen Foundation President Nancy Brinker’s assertion today that Handel wasn’t involved in the decision to end most affiliates’ grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings, let alone her assertion that none of their decisions were “political.”
Interestingly, before Brinker took the reins of the organization itself and Handel came on board, Komen’s lobbyists had typically leaned to the left, especially since the Advocacy Alliance opened.
Now, the change in mission is clearly seen. We’re seeing the branding of pink hope hand guns and carcinogenic perfumes. We’re reading about how Komen has started defunding stem cell research and hearing about the lobbying efforts made during the HCRA
passage that indicated Komen did not have the interests of under-served women in mind. Their brand is shot.
There has been plenty of controversy from Komen to date ranging from accusations they are denying links to cancer because of donations they receive to suing smaller organizations for using “for the cure” in their marketing. But they’ve weathered it because they’ve remained focused on what is and should be a completely non-partisan cause — preventing, treating and curing breast cancer. They’ve attracted women and men of all political stripes and backgrounds to their cause. It was a safe place for corporations to support the cause. Komen’s board thought they were simply cutting off a grant, for what many believe to be ideological reasons driven by Karen Handel, but what they were really doing is changing their entire mission. By taking a side in the abortion debate they essentially decided: we only want to work with men and women on the anti-abortion side of the debate, cutting off at least 50% if not more of their support.
I’d bet the board didn’t realize that’s what they were doing, but given that fact there’s no communications strategy that could have saved them. They could have handled things much better, but that was crossing the Rubicon for them. The lesson for nonprofits here is you have to always bring strategic decisions back to your mission and your supporters. How would they perceive it? Mission statements aren’t something top of mind every day and they usually aren’t something we can rattle off in an elevator. But that’s why they exist, to guide you as things like this come up.
Here’s one troubling account of other things Komen’s been up to.
Upon calling my GOP senator and speaking with his aide, I was shocked to hear her tell me “Sen.__ can’t sign on as a co-sponsor to the bill because all the breast cancer groups aren’t in agreement on it.” Shocked, I asked her who was opposing it. She told me that Komen opposed the bill. When I asked her why, she explained that Komen felt that treatment for uninsured breast cancer patients should be funded through private donations, like the pink ribbon race. I was speechless, in shock. A phone call to another activist confirmed it was true – Komen was lobbying behind the scenes to kill the bill. A moment later, Sen.__’s aide called me back and begged me not to repeat our conversation to anyone, that she had given me the information by mistake.
Thus my lesson about Komen began in 2000. They spend a lot of money lobbying for a very different agenda.
The bill passed anyway and Bill Clinton, who pushed hard in Congress for its passage, was happy to sign it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the end of Komen (and its founder, Nancy Brinker’s) political maneuvering to stall or kill legislation in Congress and in state legislatures that was supported by other breast cancer advocacy groups.
They fought behind the scenes in my state to prevent the governor from adopting the Treatment Program. They worked for several years to stall or kill the Breast Cancer & Environmental Research Act. In the end, they eviscerated it by removing new funding for environmental research and substituting a panel to review all research on breast cancer & environment. Using private funds, they recently collaborated with the Institute of Medicine to develop said report. Released last December, it sadly detailed the same old arguments that there’s no evidence of links between environmental toxins and that no further research should be done on the subject since everyone has those toxins in their bodies already. Instead they chose to blame breast cancer patients for getting the disease (more here).
They have also been accused of “pinkwashing” the disease.
Many companies that raise funds for breast cancer also make products that are linked to the disease. Breast Cancer Action calls these companies “pinkwashers.” BMW, for example, gives $1 to Susan G. Komen for the Cure each time you test-drive one of their cars, even though pollutants found in car exhaust are linked to breast cancer. Many cosmetics companies whose products contain chemicals linked to breast cancer also sell their items for the cause.
The movie Pink Ribbons Inc will certainly be afforded more attention. Given its reputation for product placement over women, anti-choice agendas over science, and higher-than-expected salaries and overhead, it seems that Lady Karma has seen to it that Komen will never again be what it was. What we need now is an alternative. As a survivor of a rare form of cervical/uterine cancer–leiomeiosarcoma–I would like to see a nonprofit foundation that truly supports research into all women’s cancers and does so while learning all the Komen Lessons.
This is another one of those instances where women should say never again. Right now, Planned Parenthood is my choice of causes. Don’t contribute to any organization corrupted by the foot soldiers in the war against women.
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