Black pastors and pro-life leaders held a press conference today protesting an exhibit some called “outrageous” at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
The exhibit contains a bust of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, an outspoken leader of the eugenics movement, ironically placed in the “Struggle for Justice” exhibit, right between iconic civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.
The event brought together speakers from all over the country who called for the taxpayer-funded museum to remove the display honoring the highly controversial figure. Speakers at the event included Bishop E.W. Jackson who led the crowd in chanting, “We must remove the bust! We must remove the bust!”
While the museum has defended its exhibit, saying Sanger represented Americans “who struggled to improve the civil and social conditions” of their time, Ryan Bomberger of the Radiance Foundation called it simply, “revisionist propaganda.” Several speakers blasted the media as well for being complicit in censoring Planned Parenthood’s racist history -- while accepting awards in Sanger’s name.
As MRC Culture previously reported, 16 journalists recently accepted "Maggie Awards for Media Excellance" from Planned Parenthood, named after Margaret Sanger. Asked to explain why they would do this, Marjorie Dannenfelser, President of Susan B. Anthony List responded.
“The problem is, there is such deep bias in the hearts and minds of so many of those journalists that they will not listen to the information,” she said. “There is no issue discriminated against more than the abortion issue [by the mainstream media].”
Melissa Ortiz, founder of Able Americans, called out journalistic integrity gone to the wayside in promoting a pro-abortion agenda. She said:
“[I]f they valued their own integrity, over the idea of driving an agenda, that they should not be willing to receive those award[s]. There’s no shame in turning away an award from an organization whose ethics and morals do not match your own. Or maybe there’s the greater problem: we have too many people out there whose morals and ethics that are matched by her agenda…”
Ryan Bomberger of the Radiance Foundation blasted the journalists who accepted these awards saying “[t]hey have no right to call themselves journalist[s].” He continued,“I just can’t imagine going home with an award and saying, ‘You know what? This award is the result of millions and millions of deaths.’ Who could be proud of that?”
Bomberger criticized the media for having “no objectivity.”
“I mean, this is what we’ve gotten from mainstream media. We get advocacy over accuracy and we get opinion over objectivity. That’s the reality.”
After the press conference, the pro-life leaders met with curators from the National Portrait Gallery, and gave the head of communications, Bethany Bentley, their petition with 14,000 signatures gathered from the past week calling for a removal of the bust:
Previously, these ministers had delivered a letter to the art gallery and were rebuffed for that request.
