Aurora Planned Parenthood clinic to open October 2, 2007 Jill There was no fraud. Just as PP had been saying all along. The anti-choice nuts aren’t going to stop their clinic assaults, but this is a big piece of good news.
Excellent news! Hooray for Aurora and the people the clinic will be able to serve. This makes my morning :>)
We’re open! thanks for covering this situation. Please stop by our blog to keep up to date as well. 🙂
Oh thank goodness. This has been such an upsetting story- if I could safely go into a PP in Austin, Baltimore etc 20 years ago, WTF is wrong with expanding this incredibly vital service? Get rid of every other McD’s and put in a PP! Get better health care, options and education more readily available to our young women! How fucking hard is this to understand??
It’s refreshing to see that the comments on the tribune story contain a small percentage of wing-nut idiots. Most are reasonable and are quick to point out that PP is more than an abortion assembly line, and that most of the protesters were bussed in from fundie churches in different towns. I get lost in the cacophany of fundie squalling and nonsense so often that I don’t pay enough attention to the decent and reasonable people who think and act about these things. This is a happy victory.
There was no fraud. Just as PP had been saying all along. No, PP had been saying all along that there WAS fraud. Its position was that it HAD to lie on the permit applications to avoid community scrutiny, protests and contractor boycotts. As one pro-choice Daily Kos supporter who attended the Aurora city council meetings explained: To start with, I’m disappointed in Planned Parenthood on several counts. The deception they used in applying for the necessary permits has given the anti-abortion forces a leg to stand on, and they are standing, believe me. It’s also left those trying like hell to defend the opening of the clinic hanging in an uncomfortable limbo because it’s hard to defend the deception, however well-intentioned it might have been. The district attorney investigating the matter simply said that no crime was committed, while specifically noting that he had no jurisdiction over city ordinances, land use or zoning, and expressed no opinion on those matters. Both of the lawyers hired by the city to investigate the civil aspects of the matter concluded that PP DID misrepresent information to city officials. The mayor simply decided that it wasn’t enough of a basis to deny a permit.
No, PP had been saying all along that there WAS fraud. Its position was that it HAD to lie on the permit applications to avoid community scrutiny, protests and contractor boycotts. “Fraud” has a meaning, RA. One that two independent attorneys and the state’s attorney for the county found didn’t apply. Businesses buy land and apply for permits all the time by using a subsidiary or a holding company to do the work. One reason they do so is if they don’t want adjoining landowners to start driving up the price they ask for if they know that a big company with deep pockets is going to be coming in. They also do so to disguise the fact that one entity is buying up a lot of land all at once. What PP did here is no different, and was found to have violated no local ordinances or state laws: The necessary permit was approved Monday after investigations by two independent attorneys and the Kane County state’s attorney found no state laws or city ordinances were violated during the permit application process, said Mayor Tom Weisner. The city had no legal basis to deny the permit, he said. The person writing the Kos diary may feel that what PP did left its supporters holding the bag in one respect or another, but that really has no bearing on whether or not the way they went about the permitting process for this particular site violated state and local law, or amounted to fraud.
sure, intentionally misleading the community is a fine example to set when its primary mission is to serve that same community. Ends justifying means is a lazy and spurious argument. Applying this logic is both inherently unprincipled and self-righteous and inconsistent with your central tenets. Personal Choice and its legal and perhaps moral derivative privacy. Collective choice, as in the community affected is dismissed with the patronizing tone of Father knows best. To suggest that the subterfuge was used for any reason other than the controversial aspects of the clinic is either a willful falsehood or a selectively utilized shutdown of reason and context