Dateline Houston

This morning, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation announced it will not cut breast-screening funds for Planned Parenthood after all.

This is what democracy looks like.

Earlier this week, the Komen foundation encountered major backlash for its decision to stop funding breast health screenings at Planned Parenthood. The foundation claimed the defunding was a result of improved grant-making procedures that prohibited funding of any organization under investigation, which Planned Parenthood is. The investigation is by Congressman Cliff Stearns, R-Florida, into whether Planned Parenthood used state funds for abortion, which is forbidden by law. It bears noting that the Komen funds were also not funding abortions but were specifically for breast health screenings, Pap smears to detect cervical cancer, and similar procedures.

The reaction was immediate. Angry messages about Komen’s decision erupted on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and the Komen website’s internal message board. A media rep for Planned Parenthood told the feminist blog Jezebel that the day after Komen’s announcement, Planned Parenthood received donations from more than 9,000 individual donors. In a normal 24- hour period, it gets 100 donors. On Thursday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged $250,000 to help restore the lost funding. Two dozen Democratic U.S. senators prepared a letter asking the Komen foundation to reconsider. This morning, in the article “Outcry is Fierce to Cut in Funds By Cancer Group,” The New York Times labeled the public reaction as “showing the power of social media to harness protest.”

On Thursday, Komen chief executive Nancy Brinker held a press conference to reiterate that the decision wasn’t political, as did the statement the foundation released today. “We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood,” the statement read. “They were not.”

Except that Komen board member John D. Raffaelli told the Times on Wednesday that (I’m quoting the Times here) “Komen made the changes to its grant-making process specifically to end its relationship with Planned Parenthood.”

Komen’s statement from this morning begins, “We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.” But they’re probably not sorry they tried to defund Planned Parenthood. They’re probably sorry they got caught.

For years, the Komen foundation has worked so successfully to brand its cause that you can hardly buy a bag of Sun Chips without contributing to breast cancer research. Supporting breast cancer research was the kind of non-partisan, feel-good cause everybody could get behind, and the Komen foundation was by far its biggest name. But now, Komen has done its reputation and fundraising profound damage. While some pro-lifers may have known of and been mad about Komen’s grants to Planned Parenthood, now that fact is widely known and neither side of the debate is likely happy—pro-choicers because Komen tried to defund and pro-lifers because it didn’t go through with it.

The grant money in question was $700,000, a fraction of the $93 million Komen distributes every year. With a brand damaged and hampered fund-raising, what other organizations will suffer because Komen played politics?

Due process and decency had a big win last week when an Austin judge ruled that defendants needing a forensic bed at a state mental hospital couldn’t be made to wait in jail for more than three weeks.

Forensic beds are the spaces at state mental hospitals set aside for defendants needing psychiatric treatment to get well enough to stand trial, a process called competency restoration. For the past five years, such defendants—three fourths of whom are nonviolent offenders—have waited in jail for an average of six months, both untreated and untried.

The lawsuit, filed in 2007 by Disability Rights Texas against the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), which operates the mental hospitals, alleged that putting mentally ill defendants on a forensic bed waiting list for unreasonable periods of time violated the defendants’ due process rights. State District Judge Orlinda Naranjo agreed, and set 21 days as the maximum period a defendant deemed incompetent to stand trial could be made to wait for a forensic bed. A defendant is considered incompetent if he or she is incapable of understanding the charges against him and assisting in his own defense.

The long wait for competency restoration is an issue that everyone involved knows is a problem, but no one seems fully capable of fixing. People have tried. As the ruling notes, in 2005, DSHS more than doubled the number of dedicated forensic beds. In 2007 and 2011, the agency successfully lobbied the Legislature to allow for shorter commitment terms and more outpatient treatment for nonviolent offenders. The 82nd Legislature also allocated funds for a new 20-bed competency restoration facility in Harris County and passed a bill to count time a defendant serves in or awaiting competency restoration toward his sentence.

Last August, in a miniature version of the present ruling, Austin county Court-at-Law Judge Nancy Hohengarten grew frustrated with the long waits and ordered the Austin State Hospital to accept five defendants immediately, citing due process concerns.

But those beds have to be taken from someone else. “Emergency room patients next on the list to get a bed will now have to wait longer or find psychiatric services elsewhere,” said Christine Mann, of DSHS, told the Austin American-Statesman at the time.

The long waiting lists exist for a reason. Texas has about 2,400 beds at its nine state mental hospitals, less than a third of which are designated for forensic commitments. And the turnover of those beds is slow; competency restoration takes an average of 35 days, according to DSHS; civil commitments—people committed from the general community for emergency care— usually take only seven to ten days.

Judge Naranjo’s ruling did not specify how DSHS would go about complying with the order, and the state has not said yet whether it plans to appeal.

Judge Naranjo notes in her ruling that the forensic bed problem is “due to funding decisions and policy decisions” but says, “these economic decisions made by the State do not outweigh the Incompetent Detainees’ liberty interest.”

And that’s it in a nutshell. Texas ranks dead last among the states in per capita funding for mental health, and the forensic bed crisis is but one place where the state’s economic decisions hurt real people.

When Houston Mayor Annise Parker joined over 80 other mayors in a press conference supporting marriage equality on Friday, she spoke the language of the people.

“We believe it’s not just the right thing to do, but it is the pro-active thing to do to support the economic health and vitality of all of our citizens and all of our cities,” Parker said.

In other words: being gay-friendly brings home the bacon.

Parker, Houston’s first openly gay mayor, was one of several mayors who spoke at the press conference in Washington, D.C., announcing a bipartisan drive for marriage equality supported by more than 80 mayors within the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

A statement by “Mayors for the Freedom to Marry” echoes the sentiment. “We stand for the freedom to marry because it enhances the economic competitiveness of our communities, improves the lives of families that call our cities home, and is simply the right thing to do.” In that order, they might have added.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In tough economic times, every little bit helps, and these savvy mayors recognize that LGBT tourism dollars are worth courting. The signed statement also points out that gay-friendliness can influence whether businesses bring jobs to a city.

“Cities that celebrate and cultivate diversity are the places where creativity and ideas thrive. They are the places where today’s entrepreneurs are most likely to choose to build the businesses of tomorrow. Allowing same-sex couples the right to marry enhances our ability to build this kind of environment, which is good for all of us.”

“Houstonians are very realistic and pragmatic when it comes to a lot of issues,” says Noel Freeman, president of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus. “They see what really matters: business. The economy. Getting things done. Being a world-class city. And we don’t let a lot of this silly stuff get in the way.”

On Saturday afternoon, I sat in the Union Station lobby of Minute Maid Park in Houston and listened to two men with acoustic guitars play a cover of “I Come From the Land Down Under” for a gray-haired audience of twelve, one of whom wore a red tee-shirt emblazoned with, “OBAMA IS A RACIST BIGOT AND TERRORIST SYMPATHIZER.”

Welcome to the Saddle Up Texas Straw Poll.

If it sounds weird, that’s because it was. For three days, some 700 Houston-area tea partiers did their version of partying, which means selling each other bumper stickers and struggling to bolster what they seemed to know was a dying relevance. The two highlights were the straw poll itself, for which one had to have a state-issued ID and register with the SUTSP but didn’t actually have to be registered to vote, and a speech by Herman Cain, who’s not actually running for president.

You wouldn’t know it to hear him talk, though. He’s still riding around in a blue bus with his face on it, touting the Cain’s Solutions Revolution, which includes 9-9-9 and a balanced budget amendment and, in his words, “Sound money—we have too much inflation and it is helping to fund terrorism.”

The audience of about 350, which had been cheering at appropriate pauses, was silent after that one. Cain didn’t elaborate.

He did take the mic from the podium and stride around perspiring, looking sea-worthy in a blue- collared shirt, white v-neck sweater and double-breasted navy blazer with brass buttons. And he told them what they wanted to hear.

“Don’t listen to the mainstream media that says we’re not a factor. We’re not just a factor, we’re a force!”

Cheers.

Attendees had each paid $75 to be thusly encouraged. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, they gathered in small rooms to hear sessions on the 10th Amendment, how to follow a bill through the Texas Legislature online, and other lessons in activist literacy. Simultaneously, speakers took to the small stage in the Union Square Lobby, one after the other, from talk radio luminaries to state lawmakers to Ted Cruz and several other U.S. Senate hopefuls leaning so far to the right as to be horizontal.

And then there was the vote. Attendees seemed to know that they weren’t voting in any legal way, but to think that the SUTSP results would influence presidential candidates’ campaign decisions. “I’m excited that candidates might stay in the race long enough for Texas to have a voice in the election,” said Sue Stringer of the Alvin Tea Party.

“Romney is being forced on us,” said Muriel Owens, who helped organize the straw poll. “We need a voice. We haven’t been given one by the GOP so we’re going to make our own.”

Muriel, a semi-retired chiropractor who supports Ron Paul, had an inch-high corona of dyed red hair and a grandmotherly countenance. We sat together listening to the guitarists and waiting for the straw poll results. Cain had just departed, taking with him most of the audience and practically all of the media. Cain closed by affirming his and the tea party’s disempowerment, to cheers. “We the people are coming!” he roared. “We want our power back and we are going to get it!”

Standing ovation.

Muriel was small and kindly, and I wanted to like her. I wanted her to tell me what all the fuss was about, why she and so many people that I would otherwise let dog-sit for me had organized this weird, expensive, symbolic event.

“Why hold this Straw Poll?” I asked. “What do you want?”

“I want the government out of my daily life,” she said.

“But what would that look like,” I said, “day to day?”

“Well,” she began slowly, “I would abolish the EPA. When they start telling us what kind of light bulbs to buy, that is an abomination.”

I thought her language a little extreme, but confessed to liking the incandescent.

“And they’re not teaching the exceptionalism of the United States. They are not teaching our children to understand how truly fortunate we are to live here. They’re trying to make it so that everyone’s the same, but that just brings everyone down. At my grandson’s T-ball tournament, at the end, everyone got a trophy, even the losers!”

“But,” I began, “the government didn’t give the losing team a trophy…”

“No…” she conceded. We sat with our hands in our laps.

At this point, I was still with her. I didn’t have to agree, but I could see where the feelings came from.

Then she continued. “Well, but they want us all in a one-world corporation. UN Agenda 21 promotes certain practices that will put us into a one-world corporation. That’s why they want us to have electric cars and live in cities, so they can control…”

And with that, the weird returned.

Half an hour later, the guitarists were permitted to leave the stage and organizers took over. The crowd was spare. In a raffle of twelve items, only three winners were still in attendance. After dozens of thank-yous, they finally announced the results. Ron Paul had won. Muriel cheered.