The QueQue, June 29, 2011

While the tweet was quickly removed and the account set to private (meaning you can’t see it), the company’s Facebook page was also deleted (leaving many frustrated, enquiring minds in the dark). Many unsuccessful attempts have been made to contact Brown’s Blanco, but for now, all we know by way of explanation is what he posted on his blog Tuesday:

“This was a post about CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY and LAWS (a la Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, etc.), not PEOPLE; but somehow people began to twist what was written and added their own lies to the post to mean that somehow we at The Brown Coffee Company are hateful, homophobic, intolerant people. … we have been viciously maligned for something we never said.”

The confusion obviously lies in a misreading of that curious word “legitimaze.”

Planned Parenthood unhitched

While the 2012-2013 state budget already gutted state family planning to the tune of some $70 million, ensuring that an estimated 300,000 low-income and uninsured Texas women could lose basic care, including screenings for breast and cervical cancer, according to the Legislative Budget Board, some lawmakers circled back during the special session to finish the job by effectively kicking Planned Parenthood out of the state-funded family-planning business.

“The result is all bad — more abortions, and more families who will look to the government for public assistance,” said Jeffrey Hons, President and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Trust of South Texas.

And language currently being drafted by the state’s Health and Human Services Commission is also expected to ban Planned Parenthood from of the state’s Women’s Health Program, a Medicaid-waiver program that saves Texas over $40 million every year. Planned Parenthood currently serves roughly 40 percent of the women in the program.

In all, anti-abortion groups have prided themselves in making Texas the largest state to, in practice, block state funds from Planned Parenthood. “Family planning dollars are a revenue stream for the abortion industry,“ said Elizabeth Graham, president of Texas Right to Life. “[Lawmakers] rightly put in restrictions to make sure that family planning agencies and organizations not in the abortion business would be eligible for family planning dollars first, leaving abortion providers as the last level of priority.”

Planned Parenthood says Texas is poised to clash head-on with the federal Health and Human Services Department, which recently rejected similar measures to block Planned Parenthood from state funding in Indiana. A federal judge sided with Planned Parenthood in Indiana on Friday, blocking the implementation of a newly passed state law excluding the group from the Medicaid program.

“We’re watching the situation in Indiana closely,” Geoff Wool, a spokesman with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, said Tuesday. “We recognize the similarities to what’s going on in Texas, but each situation is different, and we’re moving forward to do what we need to do.” •