Anti-Aortion and Anti-Gay Susan G. Kome Executive Resigns

As part of the continuing damage control efforts at the Susan G. Komen Foundation in the wake of the organization's disastrous and short lived decision to completely de-fund Planned Parenthood, anti-abortion and anti-gay extremist Karen Handel has resigned (or, as some conjecture, was fired) from the Komen board. Sadly, the Komen leadership continues to seek to avoid telling the truth coming clean. Although thew Komen board will not admit it, the now departed Karen Handel is increasingly seen as the force that brought about the decision to de-fund Planned Parenthood. The result may well be that donors lost as a result of last week's debacle may never come back. Here are some highlights from CNN:

Karen Handel, a vice president with the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation who resigned Tuesday after a controversy over funding for Planned Parenthood projects, blasted the organization and defended her role in the debate.

Komen's founder and CEO, Nancy Brinker, said in a statement she had accepted Handel's resignation and acknowledged, "we have made mistakes in how we handled recent decisions."

Handel, the foundation's senior vice president for policy, opposes abortion. She was the driving force behind the foundation's decision not to renew parts of its longstanding partnership with Planned Parenthood, the Huffington Post reported earlier this week after reviewing internal e-mails at the foundation. Planned Parenthood operates hundreds of family clinics where abortions are performed.

Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state, was a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Georgia in 2010, losing to current Gov. Nathan Deal in a primary runoff. "Let me be clear, since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood," Handel wrote on her campaign website in 2010.

Several online petitions had called for Handel to be fired, including one from CREDO Action that the organization said Tuesday had some 50,000 signatures. "Komen may have apologized, but they still need to clean house, starting with the person who drove this atrocious action," the petition said "If Komen wishes to rehabilitate its devastated reputation and gain back trust, Handel needs to be fired."

As Bob Felton aptly notes, it is time for the Komen Foundation to tell the truth or possibly face a slow but steady collapse of its organization:

In my own case, there were two elements of this thing that grated:

■ To withdraw the funding in order to frustrate abortions, with the result that other necessary services were not available — abortion is a small part of what Planned Parenthood does — is very much a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater (so to speak). It exhibited, in my judgment, fanaticism if not actual mean-spiritedness directed against the women who rely on Planned Parenthood.

■ Komen was dishonest. They should have said straight-out what they were doing — “We will no longer fund Planned Parenthood because they perform abortions.” — instead of trying to slide under the radar with disingenuous crap. That would have angered some people, and pleased others, but at least everybody would have known what Komen was doing and why, and what their donations were supporting or not supporting.