Colorado Recall Elections and Planned Parenthood
Last week I sat on a panel in Boulder, CO before a packed room of voters there to talk about the issues that mattered most to them. I was talking about religious liberty, but it was clear that a lot of people there wanted to talk about tomorrow's recall election for three members of the Jefferson County school board.
As a recent AP story on the election noted, "While school-board spats typically are confined locally, these recall efforts have attracted spending from special-interest groups in a battle over what education reform should look like." One such special-interest group, as Jennifer Kerns noted recently for The Daily Signal, is Planned Parenthood.
Kerns points out that Planned Parenthood has a profitable arrangement with many Colorado schools; the schools buy their "birth control training kits" (which contain all sorts of things that belong nowhere near kids) at $125 a pop, and Planned Parenthood makes money. This is the same Planned Parenthood, by the way, whose Denver-based Rocky Mountain affiliate was last seen laughing over dismembered body parts in Center for Medical Progress sting videos and who has been the subject of a lawsuit regarding a minor girl brought in for a potentially illegal abortion by her own rapist.
Their 501(c)4 is actively involved in the recall election, no doubt they care little about tying teacher performance to salary, but a lot about how many more "training kits" they can sell to underage girls.
What Kerns has revealed in her excellent reporting is that Planned Parenthood's open involvement in the Colorado recall election makes clear that there is a lot more at stake in that race than whether just a handful of outspoken school board members will get the boot.