Shmuck of the Week

By Jonathan Shikes Thu., Feb. 28 2008 at 12:58 PM

March would mark the 104th birthday of the late Dr. Seuss, and the event is being celebrated at elementary schools around town, where teachers are reading books and stories by the author, whose real name was Theodor Geisel, and by the big-screen release of the animated Horton Hears a Who! (which stars the voices of Jim Carrey and Steve Carell, and which will hopefully be better than Carrey’s live-action Grinch or Mike Myers’s live-action Cat in the Hat).

So leave it to the religious-right-wingnuts at the anti-abortion group, Colorado for Equal Rights, to poop on Dr. Seuss’s party by appropriating this book, which was written to entertain children and capture their imaginations, not for political purposes or a social agenda, and its famous slogan, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” The reason? Colorado for Equal Rights is trying to organize a ballot measure asking voters to say that "personhood" begins at conception, meaning fertilized eggs would be protected from that moment on. The group would like to make abortion illegal. “It's so true that whatever stage of life you're in, you're a person, whatever your size,” Kristi Burton, the founder of the group was quoted as saying in the Denver Post.

Thanks Kristi. And a Shmuck’s a Shmuck, no matter how big.

To read about last week’s Shmuck, click here.