Gail Collins has a good piece in the New York Times about the latest smears perpetrated by Lila Rose (and hyped by fraudster Andrew Breitbart) against Planned Parenthood.

“Planned Parenthood aids and abets the sexual abuse and prostitution of minors,” announced Lila Rose, the beautiful anti-abortion activist who led the project. The right wing is currently chock-full of stunning women who want to end their gender’s right to control their own bodies. Homely middle-aged men are just going to have to find another sex to push around.

Live Action hired an actor who posed as a pimp and told Planned Parenthood counselors that he might have contracted a sexually transmitted disease from “one of the girls I manage.” He followed up with questions about how to obtain contraceptives and abortions, while indicating that some of his “girls” were under age and illegally in the country.

One counselor, shockingly, gave the “pimp” advice on how to game the system and was summarily fired when the video came out. But the others seem to have answered his questions accurately and flatly. Planned Parenthood says that after the man left, all the counselors — including the one who was fired — reported the conversation to their supervisors, who called the authorities. (One Arizona police department, the organization said, refused to file a report.)

Still, there is no way to look good while providing useful information to a self-proclaimed child molester, even if the cops get called. That, presumably, is why Live Action chose the scenario.

The truth is that Lila Rose could not care less about real child slavery. Using actors playing pimps and prostitutes is a cynical trick, as Collins points out, to smear an organization that helps millions of low-income women every day. But Rose’s fanatical religious views tell her it’s fine to lie, distort, and fabricate evidence if it furthers the cause of destroying women’s rights.

Rose is an extremist, and more than a little unhinged, and it’s a disgrace that the media pay any attention to her cheap, ugly smear tactics. Here she is at the religious right’s Values Voter Summit in 2009, advocating that abortions should be done “in the public square,” because it would let us hear the angels sing.

Gail Collins says it well:

There are tens of millions Americans who oppose abortion because of deeply held moral principles. But they’re attached to a political movement that sometimes seems to have come unmoored from any concern for life after birth.