WHAT I GOT WRONG
When I speculated that the Susan G. Komen people, under the influence of newly hired wingnut VP Karen Handel, might have concluded that there was money to be made rebranding the group a right-wing cause celebre, I wasn't thinking too much like a crazy right-winger -- I was failing to think enough like a crazy right-winger. I was imagining that these people knew that there was likely to be fallout from ditching Planned Parenthood, and that they thought there might be some advantage -- that ongoing sense of team loyalty and solidarity and grievance -- in aligning themselves with the right.
In fact, what they really seem to have been thinking -- not just Handel but (as we now learn) Ari Fleischer, who was brought in as Komen adviser -- was that ditching Planned Parenthood really wouldn't come with much of a cost. Clearly Handel, Fleischer, and whoever else shared their worldview live in an epistemically closed wingnut world and believe that everyone feels about Planned Parenthood the way they do, with the exception of a tiny liberal sliver of the population. That was a tremendous misjudgment, and it comes because the right increasingly believes its own deceitful talking points about how extreme and out of touch liberals are. Well, don't stop believin', folks. Do us a favor and keep making bad judgments like this.
They had a pretty good strategy for handling the problem of links to conservative bogeyman Planned Parenthood: cut ties with this controversial organization before the shit hits the fan. They just had no idea that that strategy would also entail mixing up corporate-friendly, innocuous-seeming happy pink b00beez charity with the politics of abortion such that _they_ looked like the ones "politicizing" something hitherto apolitical-seeming. The resulting world of hurt serves them right.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, somehow, in their minds, this fracas has proved to them how extreme and out of touch liberals are.
ReplyDeleteSGK will never get another penny from me. I will never buy anything branded with their pink ribbons, or pink whatever.
And SGK doesn't give a shit about any of this except that it's now hurt their funding.
Charitable, or any other, organizations, need to beware of letting the Conservative barbarians into their gates.
They don't care about YOUR agenda - they only care about inflicting THEIR own agenda on yours, and using you as cover for heinous, despicable, and deplorable behavior.
To "cundgulag"
ReplyDeleteExcuse me...I thought that they were a private company. Every organization has it's own "agenda" that it would like to "inflict" on another, doesn't it? "Conservative barbarians" or Liberal "barbarians"...each can let "into their gates" anyone they choose. Name a big organization, including PP that doesn't worry about how their funding is impacted--whatever side of the fence it happens to be standing on? Nice to know that one can give their "pennies" to whomever he/she wants, isn't it?