Planned Parenthood Question at CNN/YouTube.com Debate Part of Organized Effort

Newsbusters revealed the overwhelming left-wing bias of the YouTube video question clips at the CNN Democrat presidential debate on Monday night. One of the most outrageous questions of the night came from Anne Laird of Pennsylvania (pictured at right), who identified herself as an employee of Planned Parenthood. Laird asked, “My question is, we here at Planned Parenthood support comprehensive sex education, and I'd like to know if any of you as candidates have talked to your children about sex, and used medically accurate and age-appropriate information?” Laird uses the word “we” in the question -- due to the fact that her clip was one of 22 that was submitted by Planned Parenthood and its supporters on one YouTube.com account with the user name PPVotes.

Laird, an Altoona, Pennsylvania native who works for Planned Parenthood in the Pennsylvania state capitol of Harrisburg, asked her question at a recent Planned Parenthood conference in Washington, DC, as revealed by an article in the Altoona Mirror. Other attendees at the conference asked a range of questions which reflect Planned Parenthood’s comprehensive sexual agenda, from “Would you push for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment?,” “Will you repeal the global gag rule?” (referring to the Mexico City policy of the Reagan administration, which was reinstated by the Bush administration), to “Would you protect a woman’s right to control her body?” (an obvious reference to Planned Parenthood’s support for Roe v. Wade).

Besides Laird, three other YouTube.com video submissions from the Planned Parenthood conferences dealt with the issue of sex education, whether it was “comprehensive,” “medically accurate,” or as Laird put it, “age-appropriate.” For those who are unaware of Planned Parenthood’s viewpoint on “age-appropriate” sex education, one only need to look at a book that the organization was promoting called “It’s So Amazing,” which introduced children as young as 7 to masturbation and homosexuality, and to Planned Parenthood’s viewpoint that homosexuality is “as normal as heterosexuality.”

Host Anderson Cooper addressed Laird’s question to John Edwards and to Barack Obama. Cooper’s choice of Obama isn’t surprising, since it was only last week that Obama got into some hot water over his comments about sex education for children in kindergarten (which were made in an address to Planned Parenthood, by the way). Cooper and/or CNN must have thought Obama deserved a chance to “redeem” himself, though he has been pretty consistent in his position over the years. This effort follows ABC News’s attempt to turn the Obama controversy into an attack on Mitt Romney, who was vocally critical of Obama on the sex education issue.

Given all of the above, it shouldn’t be surprising that Laird’s video clip was chosen in the first place.

(Thanks to Ken Shepherd for directing me to the PPvotes YouTube.com page in the first place.)