{"id":182440,"date":"2015-09-21T17:43:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-21T22:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/09\/21\/this-is-a-night-for-weird-history\/"},"modified":"2015-09-21T17:43:00","modified_gmt":"2015-09-21T22:43:00","slug":"this-is-a-night-for-weird-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/09\/21\/this-is-a-night-for-weird-history\/","title":{"rendered":"This is a Night for Weird History"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just discovered that Prescott Bush, George H.W.’s dad, and George W’s and Jeb’s grand dad, was one of the founders of Planned Parenthood<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Can you name any historical figures who helped Planned Parenthood kick off its first fundraising campaign back in 1947? If you first guessed some progressive liberal icon, you\u2019d be wrong.<\/p>\n

The die-hard public pro-life bona fides of George W. Bush and his brother and current GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush are undeniable. Jeb has repeatedly said that he would defund Planned Parenthood if he\u2019s elected, and it\u2019s been a promise he\u2019s been making long before the Center for Medical Progress launched their viral undercover video campaign attacking the non-profit, claiming the organization was \u201cselling baby parts.\u201d<\/p>\n

But a little known fact \u2014 first resurfacing in a 2005 article in SFGate<\/a> \u2014 reveals that the grandfather and father of the last two Bush presidents, Prescott Bush, was the treasurer of the organization in its early years.<\/p>\n

But even then, supporting a woman\u2019s right to control over her own reproductive system was politically dangerous.<\/span><\/p>\n

The political repercussions hit hard. Prescott Bush was knocked out of an expected victory for a Senate seat in Connecticut in 1950 after syndicated columnist Drew Pearson<\/a> declared that it \u201chas been made known\u201d that Bush was a leader in the \u201cBirth Control Society\u201d (The old name of Planned Parenthood had been the Birth Control Federation of America<\/a>.) Recall that contraceptives were controversial in those days \u2014 and remember that a constitutional right to use them wasn\u2019t established until 1965, when the Supreme Court affirmed an implied right to privacy in Griswold vs. Connecticut. <\/p>\n

Prescott Bush won a Senate seat two years later, and his son George and daughter-in-law Barbara continued to support Planned Parenthood even after George\u2019s election to Congress from Texas. In fact, he was such an advocate for family planning that some House colleagues gave him the nickname \u201cRubbers.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If I believed that there was an ounce of integrity in the Bush Crime Family, my head would hurt, but Poppy Bush made it patently clear that this was not the case when he turn his back on both his father’s legacy and own his lifelong support of reproductive rights to become Vice-President.  (And let us not forget that Prescott Bush’s investment firm was shut down for acting as an agent of Nazi Germany in 1942<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I don’t think that this family would walk a straight line if their lives depended on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just discovered that Prescott Bush, George H.W.’s dad, and George W’s and Jeb’s grand dad, was one of the founders of Planned Parenthood: Can you name any historical figures who helped Planned Parenthood kick off its first fundraising campaign back in 1947? If you first guessed some progressive liberal icon, you\u2019d be wrong. The …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1011,1051,978,1122,1215,1015],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-hypocrisy","category-politics","category-reproductive-rights","category-the-bush-crime-family","category-weird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182440"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182440\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}