CREDO helps you tell the Department of Health and Human Services to bar states from withholding federal Title X family planning funding for any reason other than competence. In other words, if a state wants to use that absurdly bogus Planned Parenthood video as an excuse to deny it federal funding, it won't be able to -- unless it can prove Planned Parenthood delivers services very badly, which would be tough, to say the least. Title X, of course, doesn't fund abortion (because the Hyde Amendment prevents that), but it funds birth control, cancer screenings, and STD management, for low-income women who'd have trouble affording these things on their own. What right does our federal government have to tell states what to do with Title X money? A pretty absolute right, since it's federal money and no state has a Constitutional right to impose conditions upon our government and still feed at its trough. Of course, our federal government also has this right because it's our money, and I'd find it very hard to believe that many Americans would prefer to pay for services that don't work, or deny funding to services that do. I know it doesn't always seem that way, but stupid people are loud, and while being stupid and loud gets you more cable news airtime, it doesn't give you more say than everyone else. Not in my America, at least.
Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the World Bank to stop financing coal, oil, and gas projects. The World Bank lent some $2 billion in these projects in 2015, despite linking one out of every 10 deaths on Earth to air pollution, and despite estimating that premature deaths from air pollution -- which coal, oil, and gas development surely exacerbate -- resulted in around $225 billion in lost income all over the planet in 2013. If you're worried that stopping World Bank financing will cause energy prices to spike all over the planet, please do three things: 1) recognize that as a rhetorical hostage situation; 2) ask yourself if these fanciful higher prices would really be worse than causing more death with air pollution and edging this planet further toward uninhabitability, and 3) ask yourself if fossil fuel development really needs World Bank money. No, wait, there's a 4) as well: ask yourself if organizations that have a lot of money would do better investing in corporations that are willing to move with the times, which means moving toward renewable energy sources and away from making climate change worse -- which is what most folks say they want anyway. Clearly, the "free" market hasn't delivered on giving people what they want; that's why we have a thing called public pressure.
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