Mike Pence Says Funding Planned Parenthood Makes People Sad:
In an op-ed at the conservative clearinghouse for all things bugfuck insane, Townhall.com (motto: "Masturbation guaranteed"), Indiana Republican Congressman Mike Pence calls for Congress to defund Planned Parenthood because he doesn't like that abortions are performed at some of the organization's locations. Living in Indiana is not unlike living inside the single toilet in a house of giants with irritable bowel syndrome, and Pence's district is one particularly awful part below the rim. It is also one of the whitest places left in America, where people from Appalachia moved when auto plant jobs were created decades ago, jobs that have since mostly dried up. You will see more Confederate flags on pick-up trucks in this part of this ostensibly northern state than you will in some areas of Mississippi.

Pence is sometimes seen as one of the saviors of the conservative wing of the GOP (also known, at this point, as "the GOP"). Here's how Pence puts the current funding of Planned Parenthood: "Last year alone, according to Planned Parenthood's own annual report, it received 34% of its $1.04 billion in revenue from government grants and contracts, and performed more than 305,000 abortions. Planned Parenthood and its advocates will claim that the money they have received from the federal government has not been used to fund abortions, and that is technically accurate." Because, you see, the money given to Planned Parenthood frees up abortion money, so we're indirectly paying for abortions.

So, by Pence's "logic" (if by "logic," you mean, "a strange amalgam of religious paranoia and dubious fiscal reasoning by a man who shoves corncobs up his own ass because he's the one Republican desperately trying to avoid fucking another man or woman"), as he writes, his amendment to an appropriations bill "would close the loophole that has forced millions of pro-life Americans to subsidize the nation's leading abortion provider, sustaining and underwriting the destruction of innocent human life that has been carried out on a massive scale by Planned Parenthood."

You got that right? We wouldn't want to offend the pro-life Americans by providing money to an organization that does more to actually prevent abortions than every bullshit abstinence program everywhere. No, no, we wouldn't want Planned Parenthood to be there to mop up for the utter failure of conservative sex education plan to actually educate about sex. Whores have to keep their babies.

Pence goes on to spout the anti-choice talking points of the Family Research Council and others, about the couple of cases involving improper practices by Planned Parenthood. And then throwing in the "abortion is racist" argument put forth, most recently, by Alveda King, the who-gives-a-fuck niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Seriously, just because you're the spawn of King's sibling, how does that give you any moral weight at all? How distant do you have to be from a person before their relation to you doesn't matter to idiots?)

Part of being in a representative democracy is knowing that you gotta suck it up. You hope that a good part of the shit you care about is actually dealt with, and if it ain't, then you elect people to change it. Now, Pence is trying to do that. But the argument that he's using is fucked and backwards. You don't defund the military because you don't believe in the war being fought. You work to stop the war.

And if your goal is actually to end abortions and not to please a bunch of craven zealots who don't wanna join the 21st century, then you would probably want to actually work with Planned Parenthood, not against it.