It took D.C. Mayor Vince Gray about 13 hours after leaving jail early Tuesday morning to start muddling his message on D.C. rights by linking it to abortion rights.
The mayor made the rounds on local and national television broadcasts, explaining he refused to leave Constitution Avenue on Monday evening and chose to be arrested because he was fighting for the city’s control over its budget. While on his media blitz, Gray tried to fight the national perception that his stand was over congressional meddling with abortion and not D.C.’s right to choose how it spends its local dollars.
But Tuesday afternoon, Gray called reporters to a downtown Planned Parenthood branch. As he spoke about D.C. rights, “Planned Parenthood” stood out in bold white lettering against a bright blue background on the awning to the family planning clinic just behind Gray’s head.
“Certainly abortion was already connected with this issue, it shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” Gray said of a rider to the federal budget that bans the spending of D.C. dollars on abortions. “It’s a travesty, it’s an insult to women and why are women in this city being singled out over women across the country?”
By unlinking D.C. rights and abortion, Gray had the opportunity to try to build national consensus for the District’s financial freedom. But by putting the two so closely together, Gray might have put the D.C. rights message at the center of a national debate about abortion and federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
Other officials helped Gray build the link.
“How ironic that the District of Columbia’s call for dignity under the Constitution is pitted against a woman’s dignity and reproductive rights,” said Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services BB Otero.
