Sluts for Choice

Participants shout slogans and display placards during a rally to “stand up for women’s health” at the National Mall in Washington, DC, on April 7, 2011. Participants from across the country gathered in a show of support for Planned Parenthood, the family-planning group in the crosshairs of the budget battle blazing in Congress, where a federal shutdown is looming. AFP PHOTO/Jewel Samad (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

As the GOP, lead mostly by well-off white men, attempts to leverage a potential government shutdown by stripping funds for Planned Parenthood, doesn’t this young woman’s sign nail the subterfuge right on its head?

As we know ( though it typically plays out it in code), the right-wing justification for eliminating funding for abortions comes down, when addressed in general, to morality, and in the specific case, to character. According to this knee-jerk thinking, it is not that a Republican woman, just as likely as a Democratic woman, or a rich woman, as much as a poor woman would find herself in circumstances leading to consideration of this profoundly difficult medical intervention.  In the minds of these holier-than-thou legislators, it is, instead, loose left-wingers or ignorant poor women who have abandoned their moral compass who end up in such circumstances (and need to be taught a lesson).

As I read the cleverness of the sign held aloft by this woman protesting on the National Mall this morning, the message back to the GOP is: If the subtext of your legislative hostage-taking involves branding us as amoral, then let me just say it for you.

…And then, we well know the other side is playing absolute hardball with “the changing face of choice.”

(caption: Participants shout slogans and display placards during a rally to “stand up for women’s health” at the National Mall in Washington, DC, on April 7, 2011. Participants from across the country gathered in a show of support for Planned Parenthood, the family-planning group in the crosshairs of the budget battle blazing in Congress, where a federal shutdown is looming.)