The Brazos Valley Coalition for Life, strangely unsuccessful in its attempts to shut down Planned Parenthood clinics in Bryan and Houston, is moving its traveling menagerie of disinformation to Lufkin in order to better harass the people patronizing the clinic there.
Trouble is, it doesn't sound much like the people of Lufkin want them around. The Lufkin Daily News out and out called Bereit's threat to publish the names and addresses of Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast Texas supporters "blackmail," and encouraged readers to donate to PPHSET in response. Now Bereit is trying to make it sound like the oppressed fundamentalists of East Texas require the BVCL's intervention to quash the sinister menace of low cost gynecological care and sex education.
My favorite quote, from the ensuing media coverage, has to be from this editorial:
We wonder how Mr. Bereit can ignore, not only the irony, but the hypocrisy of this situation.
He and his group wish to exercise their right to free speech and the freedom to assemble in order to prevent others from doing so.
Abortion counseling is not abortion. Neither is sex education a career guide for prostitution.
Mr. Bereit's assertion that Planned Parenthood's sex education programs encourage promiscuity and sexual experimentation is as devoid of logic as the assertion that mentioning abortion encourages it.
And the idea that women are so easily led that any talk of contraceptives and abortion will inspire them to promiscuity and to terminate their child's life is not only laughable, it is insulting.
Emphasis mine. Bereit isn't ignoring the hypocrisy; in his mind (and in the minds of all such Crusaders), he's the only one standing between these wholesome, apple-cheeked women and the diabolical fiends at Planned Parenthood who would steer them into no good.
The above article is from that notoriously liberal rag, the Lufkin Daily Sentinel, by the way.
If only all this talk about contraceptives and abortion could fix the vast, empty wasteland that is my love life. For that reason, I wish he were onto something. :)
The thing that always boggles my mind about these debates is the fact that not only does talking about sex education issues not lead to abortion, it in fact helps PREVENT abortion. I'd have a much easier time listening to anti-choice rhetoric if that one fact would get recognized. I'd find it much easier to take someone's arguments against a woman's right to choose if they would support educating women, especially in impoverished and under-educated areas, about ways of not getting pregnant in the first place. Seems so simple to me. But, of course, we apparently don't have the right to choose ANYTHING about our bodies to some of these people. That makes me cranky.
If "women [were] so easily led that any talk of contraceptives and abortion will inspire them to promiscuity", we'd all get laid a lot more often.