wtfox?!

paolaandfrancesca:

fridaphile:

thedailywhat:

Karen Handel’s Komen Resignation of the Day: The fallout from Susan G. Komen’s now-reversed decision to end its breast-cancer screening partnership with Planned Parenthood continues, as controversial Komen exec Karen Handel — who served as the charity’s vice president for public policy — tendered her resignation this morning.

In a letter to her colleagues, Handel, a staunch pro-life activist, said she supported the defunding of Planned Parenthood, but claims the decision was not politically motivated.

“Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology,” she writes in her letter of resignation. “Rather, both were based on Komen’s mission and how to better serve women, as well as a realization of the need to distance Komen from controversy.  I believe that Komen, like any other nonprofit organization, has the right and the responsibility to set criteria and highest standards for how and to whom it grants.”

Handel, a Peach State Republican who was hired by Komen just last year, previously served as Georgia’s Secretary of State. 

[ap / khk / photo: rollcall.]

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. 

I’m glad to see her go, but her resignation reads like a rat abandoning a sinking ship. She knows SGK has pretty much ruined their reputation and probably won’t recover for a long time, in large part because of her. Seriously, she went in there and pooped all over their floor and now she’s sashaying off to spread her feces of anti-choice, anti-gay propaganda somewhere else while the organization tries to clean up behind her. They let her in, so Nancy Brinker and the board are still culpable (and SGK has always been about pinkwashing), but I still find Handel’s attitude to be infuriating. What will she ruin next?

Here’s hoping Fox News doesn’t give her a talk show.

Well, to be fair, Brinker’s politics have always been conservative, and SGK has always been beset with its inability to pull in pro-life dollars for its funding of PP. I believe they pulled her in to do exactly what she did: find a way to weasel out of donating to PP—essentially, finding a way to politicize the situation under cover of fiscal responsibility. Where SGK screwed up (tactically) was bringing in a person who has made hay out of abortion politics, and whose record of anti-choice involvement is extensive and public. 

I agree with thecranium, who said elsewhere that Handel did what she came to do. Both she and SGK as a whole sorely underestimated the extent of public support for PP, but Handel wants to view herself as the martyr who stood by her cause while SGK recanted. Her resignation reads to me not so much like a rat abandoning a sinking ship, but a rat who’s pissed off at other rats for not valuing her ideological commitments above donor money.