Compare and Contrast
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I'm here to piggyback on the excellent posts done by Jane and Brendan on NARAL's Nancy Keenan and her strange Susan-Estrich-like ineffectiveness as head of what was once a top-shelf pro-choice advocacy group.
Many of you were wondering, as the news of the Roberts Court's decision criminializing the safest form of late-term abortion had spread, if Ms. Keenan — whose refusal to back a filibuster of Alito, and support for Rape Gurney Joe (against the express wishes of NARAL's own Connecticut chapter!) — made the Roberts Court possible — would have the gall to use the emergency she'd created as a pretext for putting out the collection plate. Sure enough, right on schedule yesterday afternoon, NARAL Nancy put out a begging letter. Excerpts therefrom:
So how are we going to defeat this ban now that Bush’s appointees upheld it? Simple. We’re starting an all-out campaign to support the Freedom of Choice Act.
Here’s how it starts: The Freedom of Choice Act is legislation that would codify Roe v. Wade into law, and guarantee the right to choose for generations to come. But this legislation is just the first step. To ensure we never face an attack like this again, we’re not stopping until we’ve elected a pro-choice president in 2008!
Sound impossible? You’ve already proven it’s not.
As a supporter of NARAL Pro-Choice America, you helped send 1.4 million pro-choice Americans to the March for Women’s Lives. You helped defeat the South Dakota abortion ban. You elected 26 pro-choice leaders to Congress in 2006. You are a part of the million-member-strong political leader of the pro-choice movement. Together, we can make this happen, but we need your help to fund the fight. Click here to help.
It’s up to us. We can do it. Click here to make your gift today.
What Ms. Keenan isn’t telling you is that Tuesday’s Scalia-Roberts Supreme Court ruling does an end run around Roe while leaving it technically intact. As for the Freedom of Choice Act, while it may well indeed undo Tuesday's Roberts Court abomination if passed, NARAL’s own site mentions that it’s been floating around Congress since 1989 — eighteen years — and hasn’t got anywhere.
By the way: I couldn’t find the actual text of the bill on NARAL’s website; all the references I can find are just variations of the same vague smiley-face verbiage that came with the begging letter. But links to it are available over at an anti-choice site run by the National Right to Life Committee, complete with links for a current list of sponsors. It's scary when the other side has better info on your own bills than what your side is giving you.
Comparing and contrasting these two sites just helps to illustrate yet another example of how Keenan’s not doing much of anything with the cash she’s Hoovering up from us. I swear, I could pick five people at random from the comments thread for this post and they could do a much better job of online outreach, to say nothing of political outreach.
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