At the Values Voters Summit on Friday, Kansas Republican Tim Huelskamp made the absurd accusation that the president is complicit in genocide against “minorities.”
“Besides slavery, abortion is the other darkest stain on our nation’s character. And this president [Barack Obama] is looking for every way possible to make abortion more available and more frequent,” Huelskamp said. He also called Planned Parenthood “a racist organization… [that] continues specifically to target minorities for abortion destruction.”
“I am incensed that this president pays money to an entity that was created for the sole purpose of killing children that look like mine,” said Huelskamp, who has adopted four children who are “each of them either black, Hispanic, native American.”
The ultraconservative Values Voter Summit—organized by the Family Research Council—is no stranger to “black genocide” anti-abortion conspiracy rhetoric like Huelskamp’s. Star Parker compared abortion to slavery and the Holocaust at last year’s event, saying “God is true and man is the liar”; Lila Rose, whose hoax “film” features a donor offering Planned Parenthood money earmarked to abort the fetuses of black women, is speaking this year, as she has previously; and Herman Cain, who was featured at the 2011 Summit, has called Planned Parenthood, “Planned Genocide.”
But this conspiracy theory has been repeatedly debunked. The Guttmacher Institute provides a simple explanation for the higher rate of abortions among women of color today: a higher incidence of unplanned pregnancies within that demographic. “No conspiracy theories needed,” Guttmacher said.
Of course black genocide theory, like many other positions held by the “family values” crowd, is an ideological posture and not a historical fact, so a selective read of the data is just business as usual.
