Conservatives Trot Out the Pimp Routine Against Planned Parenthood
The forces of righteousness have once again unleashed their most feared weapon: fake pimps and hos. This time the victim was Planned Parenthood of Central New Jersey, which was revealed, on tape, to provide abortions! To prostitutes! And teens!
Lila Rose is an anti-abortion-rights activist who studied under James O'Keefe, the rapey lying trespasser who destroyed ACORN by pretending to be a pimp and cutting together deceptive videos. Rose runs a group called Live Action, which decided last month to pull an O'Keefe on Planned Parenthood and send a bunch of people pretending to be pimps and hookers into offices nationwide. The idea was to act like members of an underage sex trafficking ring and demonstrate the horror that even underage prostitutes have a right to reproductive medical services.
But because they are not idiots, and because it's not every day that waves of people ostentatiously telegraphing their involvement in prostitution descend on multiple family health clinics nationwide, Planned Parenthood caught on fairly quickly and called the FBI last month to let them know that either a) they were being targeted by right-wing pranksters or b) there was a sudden uptick in traffickers seeking medical services.
Thus revealed, Live Action posted what they could today. The "pimp" and "prostitute" in the video above walked into a New Jersey Planned Parenthood last month and claimed to need STD tests and abortions for a large number of 14 and 15-year-old Asian girls who don't speak English. They got the office manager to work conspiratorially with them about how to avoid triggering state laws requiring that sexual activity among minors be reported to the state and to generally seem OK about dealing with people who seemed to be human traffickers. Which is bad! On the other hand: Do prostitutes have rights to STD tests and abortions? Do teenagers? Then what's so wrong about a Planned Parenthood worker offering to provide them?
Also: It's unclear what, exactly, abortion foes would want a Planned Parenthood staffer to do when confronted by a pimp and his ho. Should she have called 911? Should she have kicked them out? Or maybe she should have humored them and called the FBI after they left?
Anyway, social workers and anyone else concerned primarily with helping poor or underserved populations: Beware friendly pimps and hos. The GOP will be riding this trick for a while.