Republican Senator Susan Collins felt so threatened by a bit of sidewalk chalk art begging her to protect women’s rights that she called the police to investigate.
On Saturday, Collins made the 9-1-1 call after someone left a colorful message in front of her home in Bangor, Maine. The missive asked Collins to support an upcoming measure to protect womens’ rights to abortion access reading, “Susie, please, Mainers want [the Women’s Health Protection Act]. Vote yes, clean up your mess.” Though the graffiti seemed pretty tame in comparison to the massive protests currently taking place outside the homes of Supreme Court Justices like Brett Kavanaugh, Collins (via Buzzfeed) filed a police report that described the message as “defacement of public property.”
Police said the message wasn’t threatening, and the city’s public works department quickly washed it away, but the whole thing has angered pro-choice activists. They see Collins’ hesitancy to support an upcoming piece of legislation that would protect a woman’s right to an abortion regardless of the Roe v. Wade outcome as a weak cop-out. Though the Senator has been in favor of abortion rights in the past, she’s refusing to endorse the Women’s Health Protection Act that should make its way to the Senate soon because the bill “protect[s] the right of a Catholic hospital to not perform abortions.” Collins is also the reason both Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch currently serve on the Supreme Court after she confirmed both men despite claiming that she “could not vote for a judge who had demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade.”
Still, since the matter of abortion access is really a right to privacy issue, it feels only fair that lawmakers who are actively trying to snuff out women’s rights shouldn’t describe a chalk message as a privacy infraction. At least for Susie, the person who left the message only got their hands on her sidewalk instead of her uterus.
(Via Buzzfeed)