Topic: CNSNews.com
An Oct. 17 CNSNews.com article by Penny Starr carries the provocative headline: "Planned Parenthood Retweets Article: Founder Margaret Sanger Just Another Racist American."
Except that the article in question doesn't say that all, no matter how much Starr hints it does. She can only hint at that because she knows it doesn't.
The article in question that Starr is attacking Planned Parenthood for having retweeted comes from the Rewire site, and it debunks the right-wing idea that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was motivated by racism and shows how anti-abortion activists use that false image of Sanger to shame black women. The part of thte article that Starr and CNS presumably think portrays Sanger as a "racist American" -- a phrase that appears nowhere in the article -- is a statement that "The United States is rooted in anti-Blackness" and most major corporations have some form of racism in their history, so "any argument that Black women in America should disavow Planned Parenthood because of some history of anti-Blackness would necessarily require that Black women disavow the very country in which we live."
It's quite a stretch to glean "Sanger is a racist" out of that -- especially since, as even Starr concedes, the bulk of the article makes the argument that Sanger was not motivated by racism.
Curiously, she doesn't dispute the article's main contention -- perhaps because she knows her employer has engaged in promoting those very same false narratives. As we've documented, CNS' parent, the Media Research Center, used these false and misleading quotes just last year to spread lies about Sanger.
So, with its wildly misleading headline and a refusal to challenge what the disputed article actually says, it seems Starr's attempt to smear Planned Parenthood is a failure.
