Why You Still Shouldn’t Trust Susan G. Komen, Even After Their Reversal

If there is one thing every human being knows, it’s the idea of trust. And when that trust is broken, it’s hard to rebuild it. Perhaps in a marriage, over time, trust can be restored, hopefully. But in a relationship with an organization, that trust has to be based both on actions and on research. And the bottom line with the new Susan G. Komen For The Cure organization is that the people who were once part of the organization that was known since its founding as The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation is that it’s an entirely different organization than America once knew, and trusted. Frankly, their name change proves their desire to move from being a cancer non-profit to a political organization.

It’s like when your local neighborhood bank gets bought out by a huge international financial conglomerate. “Union Trust” becomes Bank of America. Everything changes. Oh, they promise it won’t, but you and I know it always does. New policies, new practices, new people.

And it’s these new people at Komen that have changed a once non-political non-profit breast cancer fighting organization into a political profiteering organization with an agenda, beholden to the radical right.

Yes, Komen today reversed course and possibly reinstated funding to Planned Parenthood, but the fact remains that their bylaws have not changed — this is a temporary move, with no guarantee that they will fund Planned Parenthood in the future, or not restrict their funding either.

In fact, as The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent reports, it’s unclear Komen will fund Planned Parenthood in the future at all:

As some were quick to point out, the statement put out by Komen doesn’t really clarify whether Planned Parenthood will actually continue to get money from the group. The original rationale for barring Planned Parenthood was that it was under investigation (a witch-hunt probe undertaken by GOP Rep Cliff Stearns). Komen said today that the group would “amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political.”

Does that mean Planned Parenthood will get Komen grants in the future?

I asked Komen board member John Raffaelli to respond to those who are now saying that the announcement doesn’t necessarily constitute a reversal until Planned Parenthood actually sees more funding. He insisted it would be unfair to expect the group to commit to future grants.

“It would be highly unfair to ask us to commit to any organization that doesn’t go through a grant process that shows that the money we raise is used to carry out our mission,” Raffaelli told me. “We’re a humaniatrian organization. We have a mission. Tell me you can help carry out our mission and we will sit down at the table.”

News reports yesterday confirmed that Komen lost several long-time senior executives who resigned upon losing the battle to keep funding Planned Parenthood. And as we already know, newly-hired Komen Vice President Karen Handel is the catalyst behind the defunding of Planned Parenthood.

Dropping funding for Planned Parenthood was Handle’s top agenda — long before she found a way to do it from the inside.

Just nine months ago, Handel secured a position at Komen as their Senior Vice President of Public Policy, and immediately went to work on her plan to defund Planned Parenthood. Ultimately, by convincing the Board of Directors that a change to the organization’s by-laws that prohibited them from funding groups under congressional investigation would protect the Dallas, Texas based group, Handel found her way to defund Planned Parenthood, a huge win for the woman who had run for Georgia Governor on a platform that included defunding Planned Parenthood at the state level.

Yesterday, Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic confirmed all this, writing that “three sources with direct knowledge of the Komen decision-making process told me that the rule was adopted in order to create an excuse to cut off Planned Parenthood. (Komen gives out grants to roughly 2,000 organizations, and the new ‘no investigations’ rule applies to only one so far.) The decision to create a rule that would cut funding to Planned Parenthood, according to these sources, was driven by the organization’s new senior vice president for public policy, Karen Handel, a former gubernatorial candidate from Georgia who is staunchly anti-abortion and who has said that since she is ‘pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.’ (The Komen grants to Planned Parenthood did not pay for abortion or contraception services, only cancer detection, according to all parties involved.)”

But if you’re still not convinced about the tenure and trustworthiness of Karen Handel, a few more bits of information.

One, Handel was a member of the Georgia Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group, yet denied it during her gubernatorial campaign and even claimed to be against gay rights, including marriage. Handel was endorsed by the Log Cabin Republicans in 2002 and 2003.

Secondly, as Georgia Secretary of State, Handel was behind notorious so-called voter registration laws and so-called citizenship verification efforts that serve only to intimidate voters and make it especially challenging for minorities and the poor to register and vote. So extreme and indefensible were these actions that the U.S. Department of Justice ordered Georgia to cease citizenship verification under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Lastly, while inconsequential, the screen shot above of Karen Handle’s Twitter account says a great deal about who Handel is as a person and about her state of mind, not to mention her ability to actually be the senior vice president of public policy for a major non-profit. Handel retweeted a tweet from radical conservative Jade Morey that read, “Just like a pro-abortion group to turn a cancer orgs decision into a political bomb to throw. Cry me a freaking river.”

Typical insensitivity from the radical right.

Lastly, there’s this, via an email I just received from the Institute for Southern Studies:

In 2002, Southern Exposure — the magazine of the nonprofit Institute for Southern Studies, which publishes Facing South — ran a landmark investigation by Mary Ann Swissler looking at the foundation’s opposition to health care reform.

The story also critically examined Komen’s refusal to look at the environmental causes of cancer — perhaps not surprising given the group’s corporate funders.

Any questions? Can Komen For The Cure ever be trusted again? When you hire people like Karen Handel, I find it hard to come up with any way to say yes.

 

Image: Karen Handel’s Twitter account, via Yfrog.