I accept that people have good faith differences over issues like abortion, but I’ll be damned if I understand the logic of causing kids to go hungry in order to defund Planned Parenthood.
The ongoing fight over a budget provision to block Planned Parenthood funding for one year has cast doubt on future short-term funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), once known as food stamps. (On Thursday, the Senate halted Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, and it appears a vote on a clean budget bill is approaching.) Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, told the Huffington Post this week that Democrats concerned about food stamp funding should support the GOP’s resolution to keep the government running and gut Planned Parenthood.
So: You must carry that baby to term, so that the Republicans can use it as a political pawn, and let it go hungry if they don’t get their way?
There is something rotten and sick in the Republican Party now, a mean-spiritedness and short-sightedness that are new, and I say that as somebody who voted almost exclusively Republican most of his life. I don’t see any easy way for the party to heal itself, either, for it has become the political arm of a fundamentalist religious movement — of people who are unmoved by either facts or appeals to decency.
Who’s up for organizing a third party?