Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, recently spoke out against health care reform on the floor of the House. If you’re not familiar with Rep. Bachmann, she’s been in the news a lot lately, for various reasons. Like the time she asserted that filling out census forms could lead to Americans being locked up in internment camps. Or the time she called the AmeriCorps program a “re-education camp” (despite the fact that her own son had joined Teach For America, a component of AmeriCorps).

So what are her concerns about health care reform? Well, she’s particularly upset with one section in particular, which discusses “school based health clinics.” While this may sound like a reasonable thing, Rep. Bachmann believes she’s found the real point of these clinics: to institute sex clinics in schools. You can click on the link for more information, but here’s one choice quote:

“Does that mean that someone’s 13 year-old daughter could walk into a sex clinic, have a pregnancy test done, be taken away to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, have their abortion, be back and go home on the school bus that night? Mom and dad are never the wiser.”

I think we were all waiting for Planned Parenthood to be drawn into this, right? After all, who else would be behind an insidious plot to perform undercover abortions and teach our nation’s impressionable youth sex tips but Planned Parenthood? Never mind that all of her all allegations are (of course) completely false. But it’s not ignorance. I don’t believe for a second that Michele Bachmann’s stupid. She knows what she’s doing. She knows that by raising the specter of Planned Parenthood, she’ll manage to do two things at once: 1) get media attention, as the press loves a good reproductive rights debate 2) inflame a segment of the population that only has to see the name Planned Parenthood to get aggravated.

It’s actually quite brilliant, in a way. She’s not only using fear-mongering… she’s linking the health care bill to an organization that can sometimes evoke a visceral negative reaction… which means that, even if they had been on the fence about reform, these individuals probably aren’t anymore.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it offends me when Planned Parenthood is used as a tool of the radical right-wing. Say whatever you will about political agendas, but the patients who come in to the clinics, for whatever reason, generally don’t care about them. They just need help. What bothers me more, though, and what I think is the larger issue here, is the brazen, somewhat outrageous lying.

It wouldn’t take anyone very much time to refute Rep. Bachmann’s claims. In fact, as the above linked articles have noted, all one has to do is read the text of the bill. But Michele Bachmann is banking on the fact that few people will actually take the time to do that… and so she feels free to spread misinformation, knowing that even if most people think she’s crazy, a few won’t. And that’s all she needs. It’s a tactic that we see time and time again by the anti-choice movement. When the facts aren’t on their side, they lie. And, sadly, it works more often than it doesn’t.

I was recently having a conversation with my boyfriend about Rep. Bachmann. We were looking at her Wikipedia page and discussing her beliefs and stances. And he told me this: “You know, we’re sitting here and laughing about this, but she’s in power. She gets to decide things.” And it’s true. She does. She gets to have a voice, one that’s much stronger and louder than most people’s.

So what can I do? What can we do? I think a good first step is to stop laughing about it. It’s easy to see her comments and brush them off as ridiculousness. But they are taken seriously. Someone is taking them seriously. And maybe if enough of us stop ignoring or lessening these remarks, we can begin to match the voices on the other side. Because the thing is… on health care reform, on reproductive rights, on LGBT rights, on sex education… we’re in the right. We are on the right side. I know this for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that our side doesn’t have to make up lies to even have a semblance of an argument.

So I think that it’s time to stop accepting these lies, to stop being offended for a few minutes and moving on. It’s time to start letting people know that it isn’t ok to do this anymore.  This is never going to stop until enough of us say enough. And, for me at least, it’s time.

Start now by calling our US Senators from NC and letting them know you support healthcare reform- Burr: 202-224-3154 and Hagan 202-224-6342.

Cheers.

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