Birds of a feather flock together, especially when one bird is funneling hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the other.
Case in point: Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards and the Obama administration. The administration oversaw the transfer of nearly half a billion dollars to the abortion giant last year, and now Richards has announced a Planned Parenthood bus tour in support of Obama’s re-election campaign.
Since no one knows exactly what the bus tour will do, except serve as a campaign arm for the Obama administration, I guess we’ll call it the “Magical Mystery Bus Tour.”
Richards indicates that our hunch is right and that the tour will be used to garner support for the Obama administration and its numerous pledges to continue funding Planned Parenthood if given four more years. Gov. Mitt Romney’s plan to protect innocent life by defunding the abortion giant is simply unacceptable.
Richards framed it this way:
Planned Parenthood sees firsthand the people who are being hurt by policies that attack women’s health, so we know why this election matters so much. … Through this unprecedented bus tour, voters will hear directly from women in their own communities who would be hurt by policies that politicians like Mitt Romney support.
The phrase “women’s health” is quite instructive in this instance. For by it, Richards is signifying all the things she fears will be lost if the Obama administration does not get four more years. These include hundreds of millions of dollars, the abortion pill mandate, the moral support of the White House, and a president who’s willing to use his bully pulpit to stump for Planned Parenthood.
We saw how President Obama stumps for Planned Parenthood in June, when he spoke of the “virtues” of the abortion provider. We saw it again in July when Obama intimated he wants Planned Parenthood continually funded so his daughters can avail themselves of its services if they so choose: “Mr. Romney wants to get rid of funding for Planned Parenthood. I think that’s a bad idea. I’ve got two daughters. I want them to control their own health care choices.”
So it seems that Richards and others at Planned Parenthood have decided that one good scratch deserves another, thus the bus tour.
To be fair, Richards isn’t the only one clinging to the current administration in an attempt to get all she can, financially and otherwise, from people who share her appetite for the culture of death. Recently, members of Code Pink showed up in costume on Capitol Hill to demand the next logical “women’s health” provision: completely free abortion on demand. In other words, they don’t just want the Obama administration’s abortion pill mandate for four more years, but also an expansion of it to cover abortions for women during any stage of pregnancy, for any reason whatsoever.
The shared goals behind the magical mystery bus tour are, then, not such a mystery after all. And in light of the fact that taxpayers give Planned Parenthood nearly half a billion dollars a year, there’s a good chance that the funding source for this tour is anything but “magical.”
Steven H. Aden is senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal alliance employing a unique combination of strategy, training, funding, and litigation to protect and preserve religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage, and the family. Aden heads Alliance Defending Freedom’s work to defend the sanctity of life in court from its Washington, D.C., regional service center.
