Over the Labor Day weekend, arsonists set a Planned Parenthood clinic in Washington state on fire, closing the facility for at least a month. Luckily, the building was closed at the time with no occupants, so there are no injuries to report from the fire.
But officials at Planned Parenthood believe that the heavily edited videos that surfaced recently suggesting that they were selling fetal tissues are to blame for the violence against the group, and the state is currently treating the blaze as suspected arson.
The FBI warned recently that violent rhetoric from the right wing media could help spur violence in the United States, and the arson at Planned Parenthood is a direct result of media outlets like Fox News trumpeting the completely bogus controversy.
And it goes even deeper than that. The right wing attacks on Planned Parenthood – both physical and legislative – are just the latest in the Republican Party’s long War on Women.
And if Texas is any indicator, things could get much, much worse if national lawmakers follow Texas’s lead.
Texas recently issued an order that stripped Planned Parenthood of state subsidies that provide medical care for low income women, leaving thousands of low income women in the state of Texas with absolutely no access to mammograms, birth control, and pap smears. These services are vital to women, but lawmakers in Texas chose to buy into the phony outrage about Planned Parenthood and they’re putting women’s lives at risk in a purely political move.
Republican politicians understand the truth about Planned Parenthood – they know that the organization spends 97% of their time and services on women’s health issues with less than 3% of their services being on pregnancy termination. But the average Republican voter can’t comprehend this information, and they believe that Planned Parenthood is nothing more than an abortion factory for women with no morals, and that’s why the attacks on the group are gaining so much traction with the low-information Republican base.
After all, they don’t think of women of people. They think of them as commodities or trophies.
