- Robert Azmitia
- The Planned Parenthood rally on Wednesday brought hundreds to Julian Lane Park.
Alabama Republican delegate Jackie Curtiss learned a hard lesson earlier this month in Tampa. The national Republican Party is not interested in keeping its tent open for folks who believe in birth control or abortion in the case of rape. Curtiss, a 22-year-old self-professed conservative, had the temerity to question why the Republican health subcommittee was adding language to the platform that would rule out abortion in all cases, including rape.
Curtiss' impassioned plea was met with silence from the committee, as party notables, including Phyllis Schlafly, James Bopp and Tony Perkins, subsequently rammed through the most restrictive anti-choice language in the history of Republican politics. No longer would the Republican Party respect a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy that results from rape or incest.
On Tuesday night former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum continued that theme — spending a good deal of his time at the convention rostrum lecturing women on the evils of abortion and failure to marry.
But it wasn’t always this way. It may be hard for today’s young Republicans to believe, but the Republican Party, not the Democratic Party, was the original political partner of Planned Parenthood.
At Wednesday’s Planned Parenthood rally in Julian Lane Park, longtime Republican activist Randy Moody reminded a crowd of nearly 200 supporters about the shared history of Planned Parenthood and the Republican party. He pointed out that none other than the godfather of the party's conservative wing — the late Senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater — led the fight to establish a Planned Parenthood chapter in Arizona. At the federal level, a Republican president, Richard Nixon, signed the nation’s first federal family planning bill into law in 1970.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2012.