Oops. Amy Davidson, at
the New Yorker:
“I am writing to inform you that we have cancelled the Annual Awards Gala that was originally scheduled for May 17, 2012,” Blythe Masters, the Chair of the board of directors for Susan G. Komen for the Cure of Greater New York City wrote in a letter dated yesterday. Now, why would that be? Instead of an event for which tickets might to sold to all sorts of people—some, presumably, still angry that Komen had tried to cut its ties to Planned Parenthood, before pressure from its supporters made it reverse that decision—there would be another kind of event:
I would, however, like to cordially invite you to join me as my special guest at Keeping the Promise: The Grantees’ Breakfast, where we will announce our new 2012-2013 grantees….
The breakfast will be lower key and, unlike the gala, invitation only—presumably to cut down on the chances for unpleasant audience comments that come from having a larger, more open event. That said, Davidson was tipped off to the letter by a previous Komen supporter turned non-supporter who had received it, so invitation-only isn't a failsafe system either.
Is there any aspect of this new anti-women's-health fight that's been working out for conservatives? It's decimated the Komen Foundation, it's turned Congress into even more of a laughingstock (and we'll just contemplate, for a moment, just how ridiculous something has to be to make Congress look more foolish than it already does, on any given day), and it's turned transvaginal ultrasound into a household phrase. Rush Limbaugh's foray into the issue resulted in him getting plastered by an angry public and nervous advertisers. Still, they keep pressing on. Arizona is the latest state to decide that womenfolk need closer supervision when it comes to their own health choices; they're even upping the ante by proposing that individual employers ought to be able to monitor the ostensible morality of women employees themselves. That's, um, nuts.
Unless conservatives are planning on rolling back voting rights for half the population, I can't see how this can possibly work out for them. No matter how badly it backfires on groups like the Komen foundation, though, it looks like social conservatives just can't help themselves. Then, like the Komen foundation, they'll be spending the next few years mostly figuring out how to best dodge all the people they've pissed off.