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Sunday, February 05, 2006

Stirring It Up With NARAL



Well this is interesting:
On Thursday, February 9th, Kate Michelman, President Emeritus of NARAL Pro-Choice America and women from across Rhode Island will launch "Women for Matt Brown," a coalition of women supporting Brown in his campaign for U.S. Senate.

"Matt is the only candidate who has been a strong and vocal advocate of equal justice for women and consistently stood up for a woman's right to choose," said Michelman. "He embodies the commitment to women’s rights we desperately need in the U.S. Senate."

Like Brown, Michelman has been a vocal opponent of Judge Samuel Alito's nomination to.
Michelman was the head of NARAL up until 2004, and was replaced with current president Nancy Keenan. This has to signal some real contention over Keenan's decision to resolutely support Republican Lincoln Chafee in the Rhode Island senate race and dismiss his vote on Alito as "not significant." Somehow a vote on the Supreme Court nominee that shifted the balance of the entire court and cleared the way for overturning Roe was worth a massive 15 year fundraising effort but Chafee's support of this was no big deal.

I certainly hope other prominent members of the women's movement say "enough of this shit" such that NARAL's battered housewife devotion to Lincoln Chafee gets severed (as well as ties to Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe). The pro-choice vote is very strong in Rhode Island and NARAL was successful in pushing Democratic pregnacist James Langevin out of the race early on. I really do not get the logic of turning their back now on the possibility of filling a Senate seat with a candidate who would actually support what they are purportedly trying to accomplish. It's nice to know Keenan's perverse logic is missing Michelman, too.

Time to break up the Gang of 14.

Update: NARAL is encouraging you to write the senators like Lieberman and Chafee who "voted against the Alito nomination" and fucking thank them. I believe they voted against his confirmation but WTF. Yeah please smack us around some more, we just can't get enough. (thanks to neojoe in the comments)

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