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Blogs > Adolpho > My Blog


Adolpho 68M
3303 posts
6/30/2016 4:08 pm
Conservatives lose on Planned Parenthood again

From: David Nir

In an unexpected development, New Hampshire's Executive Council, a special five-member body that has veto power over state contracts, voted to restore more than $500,000 in funding to Planned Parenthood on Wednesday. The reinstatement came about because Executive Councilor Chris Sununu, a Republican who is running for governor, switched sides: Last year, he cast the deciding vote to defund the organization. This time, he was part of a 3-2 majority to restore the state's financial support for PP.

Sununu claimed that he voted against Planned Parenthood in 2015 because of the discredited videos that right-wing critics circulated to try to claim PP was involved in the illegal sale of fetal tissue. Sununu now admits that those allegations turned out to be utterly bogus (well, not exactly in those words), and so, he says, Planned Parenthood "should be treated like any other organization that comes before the council."

Whatever his justification, this high-profile about-face says something interesting about Sununu's bid for New Hampshire's open—and hotly contested—governorship. It shows that Sununu, who'd generally supported Planned Parenthood in the past, would prefer to risk giving his opponents in the GOP primary a fresh opening to attack him and potentially deny him the Republican nomination rather than go into a potential general election campaign cross-ways with Planned Parenthood, which remains widely popular both nationwide and in the Granite State. (An internal poll for the organization taken last year found that 66 percent of New Hampshirites don't support defunding.)

So whether he's motivated by rediscovered principle or election year expedience, Sununu's vote indicates that Republicans are right to fear Planned Parenthood. It may be a conservative bogeyman, but it's a conservative bogeyman loathed only by a minority—and respected by most Americans. Republicans (like Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey) who insist on bashing the group to the very end do so at their own peril.



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