By Jim Sedlak
You’ve got to hand it to Planned Parenthood. Its staff members are experts at raising money. Just look at the headlines over the last six months. Nearly everyone is busy throwing money on Planned Parenthood’s doorstep. Take, for example, Lena Dunham, probably best known as the creator and star of the HBO series Girls. She is selling the clothes off her back and giving Planned Parenthood all the proceeds. Well, not literally off her back, but from her closet.
Halsey (Ashley Frangipane), an American singer and songwriter, gave the organization $100,000. An anonymous couple in Minnesota has just given the local Planned Parenthood affiliate $6.3 million. And a number of governments (e.g., New York City and California) have vowed to give Planned Parenthood enough money to cover any loss of funds from the federal government.
Celebrities, private individuals, and even governments are throwing cash at this organization at a pace that is a bit bewildering. What’s Planned Parenthood’s secret? How can it make people do this?
As it turns out, Planned Parenthood is not doing anything new; it has simply just found a way to tap into some of the oldest and greatest sources of funds.
Back at the turn of this century, D. Kirk Davidson wrote the book Selling Sin: The Marketing of Socially Unacceptable Products. In that book, Davidson discusses the problems with selling provocative products—casinos, pornography, and others—and describes some ways public objections can be overcome. PP understands these strategies and uses them daily to sell its perversion. We know, of course, that much of what Planned Parenthood sells is recognized as sin by churches across the country. There is no major church that believes it is okay for underage boys and girls to engage in intimate sexual behavior. Yet, this is exactly the kind of sinful behavior that Planned Parenthood pushes in its sex programs in classrooms and elsewhere.
Of course, Planned Parenthood never mentions sin in its literature. It just couches the advocacy of all kinds of sexual deviancy in words like “education,” “empowerment,” and “consent.” Never mind that the rest of the sane world understands that underage boys and girls are not capable of giving real consent to the destructive practices paraded in front of them by Planned Parenthood. But Planned Parenthood doesn’t care. Whatever it needs to do to “sell sex” is okay as the money flows into its coffers from government funding of “sex education,” product sales to sexualized children, money from treating these children for devastating sexually transmitted diseases, and, of course, one of its biggest money makers—abortion. Selling sin is extremely lucrative, and that is why Planned Parenthood is so dedicated to it.
But sin is not Planned Parenthood’s only money-making scheme. It has also learned the lesson that crime pays. Any organized crime organization knows this fact of life, and Planned Parenthood taps into this money stream every chance it gets. It has been able to convince a gullible public that crime is legal. As American Life League’s president, Judie Brown, pointed out in a recent commentary:
How do we define the word crime? Perhaps the most logical place to look for the answer is in the dictionary, which gives two distinct definitions: 1) “an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government; especially: a gross violation of law” and 2) “a grave offense especially against morality.”
Keeping these definitions in mind, it would seem that abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and other assaults on human dignity are not crimes according to the first definition. But if we focus upon the second, they are all crimes. And, for those of us who understand that all human beings—born and preborn—are made in the image and likeness of God, it is the second definition that we must adhere to.
Judie is absolutely correct in her analysis, and even the most casual observer can see that everything Planned Parenthood does constitutes crimes against morality. My other writings have given evidence that Planned Parenthood, through its activities, breaks every one of God’s Ten Commandments. This immoral organization pushes immoral products and leads gullible people—both young and old—into lives of sexual sin. And the real genius of Planned Parenthood is that it is able to lie convincingly enough to convince otherwise decent folks that giving money to support these crimes against morality is good. We must remember that Satan is the father of lies, and it is through organizations such as Planned Parenthood that he manifests these lies.
The final tool in Planned Parenthood’s arsenal of fundraising is sex. Every marketer of any product who ever lived will tell you that sex sells. Of course, Planned Parenthood has developed its entire operation around sex. It is a sex business. But it really doesn’t want to be known as purely a sex business, so it has wrapped its sex business in the terrific sounding name of “women’s reproductive health services.” BAM! Everyone is supposed to latch on to this description and not look too closely. But once you do look closely, it’s like Dorothy pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz. We see the reality of Planned Parenthood and its nefarious actions—actions that include enticing children into lives of sexual sin. A 2014 investigation by Live Action illustrated this when it showed Planned Parenthood’s “educators” promoting bondage and discipline, as well as other sadomasochistic practices, to underage children. And you only need to spend a few minutes watching American Life League’s YouTube video Hooking Kids on Sex to understand the true nature of Planned Parenthood.
In a story entitled “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” two weavers promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are stupid, incompetent, or unfit for their positions. When the emperor parades before his subjects in his new “clothes,” not one person dares to say that there aren’t any clothes on him. They fear that they will be seen as unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. Finally, a child cries out: “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!” After 100 years of Planned Parenthood making money from sin, crime, and sex, it is time we see this organization through the eyes of the child in the story who was not afraid to speak the truth. And it is time we educated others to this truth so we can shout to the crowd: “Planned Parenthood get out of town!”
Planned Parenthood has the game plan for fundraising: sin, crime, and sex. The fact that it takes in massive amounts of funding, including over $500 million from the American taxpayer, is not surprising. The fact that millions of Americans blindly accept the lies of Planned Parenthood is shocking.
Jim Sedlak is executive director of American Life League, founder of STOPP International, and host of a talk show on the Radio Maria Network. He has been fighting Planned Parenthood since 1985.