Mollie Hemingway on Komen and Planned Parenthood

Writing at Get Religion , Mollie Ziegler Hemingway nails down the essence of the Komen for the Cure fracas. Liberals aghast over Komen’s move are being forced to acknowledge that Planned Parenthood is very far from the uncontroversial, mainstream organization they thought it was:

 If you were familiar with Susan G. Komen for the Cure but weren’t familiar with the fact that this funding arrangement was extremely controversial, something is off . . .

And yet the mainstream media apparently only realized that Planned Parenthood was a lightning rod  after  Komen made changes to their funding policy. I’m not exaggerating. Take this amazing  Politico  story by Kate Nocera headlined:

Did Susan G. Komen turn itself into a lightning rod?

Turn itself into? Turn itself into? Help me out here. Funding a group that terminates 330,000 pregnancies a year is not controversial but deciding not to fund that same group is? In what world? It’s important to note that Planned Parenthood doesn’t just do abortions. But many of the other things they do —  teaching kids about sex  through a text-chat program, receiving hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, spending high sums on fundraising and public policy to fight political opponents, selling or otherwise distributing contraception and abortifacients — are also controversial. Giving a woman a slip of paper to get a mammogram somewhere else is not controversial, unless by the standard that it’s not sufficient work for scarce breast cancer dollars, but you have to put the controversy in context.

More here . The surprise and anger over Komen withdrawing funding is above all naive: As it turns out, killing unborn children is actually really controversial. Who would have thought?