By Scott Tibbs, May 5, 2016
This is an open letter to the Bloomington City Council.
Councilors,
Planned Parenthood has applied for another $7,500 in corporate welfare from the city's John Hopkins social services fund, and that request should be rejected.
Planned Parenthood took in over $15,000,000 in its most recent fiscal year and has the backing of an obscenely wealthy national organization. There is more than enough money floating around Planned Parenthood nationwide to cover the money PP is requesting for its women's health fund.
As has been the case for nearly two decades now, Planned Parenthood is seeking this handout as a political endorsement instead of as a legitimate means of helping people in need. These requests are not and have never been about need. If you want to endorse Planned Parenthood, then you can pass another resolution supporting their mission like you did last year. I will oppose and speak against that resolution, but it would be far better than wasting another $7,500 that could actually do some good in this community were it not spent on politics.
In the letter you sent to social service agencies about this year's process, you state that these grants are intended to be a "one-time investment." The letter explains the reasoning for this:
This restriction is intended to encourage innovative projects and to allow the funds to address changing circumstances. To make funds available for those purposes, this restriction discourages agencies from relying on these funds from year to year and from using these funds to cover on-going (or operational) costs, particularly those relating to personnel. |
Planned Parenthood's requests have not been legitimate "one time" projects for a very long time. These are things that PP does normally. You are subsidizing PP's operating budget despite the guidelines discouraging requests for operating funds. Furthermore, things like STD testing can be done by county government's Futures Family Planning Clinic, which does not carry the moral baggage that Planned Parenthood does.
And Planned Parenthood does carry a large amount of moral baggage, which is why so many of your constituents are opposed to funding them from property taxes. In addition to killing babies every week at the "clinic" on South College Avenue, other Planned Parenthood "clinics" have been implicated in a baby parts selling scandal. This is all the same organization, with the same moral depravity. If you genuinely support PP, then you should combine to write them a check from your personal accounts. Between the nine of you (plus Mayor Hamilton) that is $750 apiece instead of forcing all of us to subsidize an organization we find morally abhorrent.
One final matter: Dorothy Granger, who volunteers for Planned Parenthood as a clinic escort, should recuse herself from this vote. In fact, she should have recused herself from previous votes. It presents an appearance of impropriety for a city councilor to be voting to give several thousand dollars of her constituents' money to an organization she openly volunteers for and supports. It is also an unfair advantage for Planned Parenthood over the other organizations that are applying for money from city government.
Thank you for your time.