Planned Protest
There’s a letter which has been making the rounds, encouraging people to donate to Planned Parenthood in honor of Sarah Palin, thereby ensuring that a thank you letter gets sent to her. It’s meant to be a consciousness-raising form of protest, and I actually thought it was pretty clever. (Needless to say, numerous people are stepping forward to take claim for the original idea.)
Which is why I was surprised to read Jezebel’s critique of the scheme. Personally, I think that the critique was poorly thought out, and lame, but I wanted to take the time to respond to it anyway, because that’s just how I roll. Basically, the argument there is that by donating to Planned Parenthood, people will be robbing Obama of donations.
And that’s wrong, on multiple levels.
First of all, I suspect that most people are capable of donating to both, should they choose to do so. It might mean splitting a donation, sending $30 to each instead of $60 to one or something, but every little bit counts, and Obama relies heavily on small donors.
Furthermore, donations don’t just take the form of money. Someone could choose to donate $60 to Planned Parenthood, and to canvass or work the phones for Obama. Man on the street campaigning is really important, especially right now, and in a way it can be almost more valuable than just sending money, especially in swing states/communities.
However, it’s more problematic than that. The assumption is that everyone who would donate to Planned Parenthood would also donate to the Obama campaign, and that is not true. I, for example, would donate to Planned Parenthood, but not to Obama. Planned Parenthood is an organization I support. I like that they provide reproductive health care services to women who need them, and the fact is that they always need more money. I don’t support the Obama campaign, because, as stated elsewhere, I don’t like Obama. As a commenter noted, being anti-Palin doesn’t make you pro-Obama.
People are calling the Planned Parenthood protest “a stupid idea” in the comments, and I think they are totally missing the point. The point is to alert people to the fact that their reproductive rights are under serious threat in a McCain/Palin administration, and to encourage people to donate to a great cause. And, of course, I love the idea of seeing the McCain campaign deluged with thank you cards from Planned Parenthood: they apparently experienced a big uptick in donations as a result of this circulating email, which is awesome.
If you don’t have a lot of money to spend on donations, you can put your money where it counts and donate to the Planned Parenthood Political Action Committee, which can spend that money on political advertisements to promote candidates which support Planned Parenthood. It’s like a nice double-whammy. I think we need to be thinking ahead about protecting reproductive rights in this country, because even if Obama wins, I think there’s going to be a lot of pressure to limit reproductive freedoms. It’s time to be proactive, not reactive, people.
It’s clever little ideas like this which mobilize people, encourage them to donate and get active when they might not otherwise do so. Jezebel, why would you want to pee on that?