While John McCain may be rethinking his lackadaisical decision to outsource the vetting of Sarah Palin to the more curious American press, I’ve really enjoyed watching all these surprising layers peel off of the panglossian pioneer we were introduced to only last week. Looking a bit like one of those stock and staid librarians in movies, the one who is only moments away from removing her glasses and liberating a thick, lustrous mane of hair with a seductive snap of the neck while stripper music trumpets on the surround-sound, Palin exudes a sense that she is always about to reveal something unexpected before our startled eyes. And the really fun part: I have a hunch she’ll only know what that something is moments before we do. But, of course, weeks before John McCain will.
What I have enjoyed witnessing to a far lesser degree has been my fellow evangelical Republicans’ response to Palin’s energetic striptease of embarrassing information. It seems that the very idea of Dick Cheney’s office being redecorated with moose throws and baby seal pelt doilies by a ferociously ambitious MILF from Alaska has rendered a group of professional faultfinders and scolds mawkishly carefree, giddy in their eagerness to forgive. With a mix of opportunism and testosterone, habitual chiders like James Dobson are swooning over Palin, light-headedly jostling to anoint and absolve. The GOP’s rehabilitation of poor, maligned Murphy Brown has been as blithe as it has been sudden.
Yes, in many ways Sarah is our kind of gal. Her first priority when she began her contentious reign as the amusingly vindictive mayor of a small, snowy town? Try to ban books at the local library that contained the type of naughty words that so rudely besmirch the English language’s great literature! And, yes, Palin embraces the God of our President and Party, a God who is more likely to fritter away His day romantically daydreaming about a $30 billion gas pipeline than plucking a victim of one of His hurricanes out of a capsized canoe.
But it is not this shared (and profitable) vision of a mercantile God that has evangelicals verbally petting Palin like a pack of Emo youths whose ecstasy has just kicked in. No, their ardor springs solely from a rather discrete source revealed rather indiscreetly: She’s fixated on bringing every embryo she comes near to term. And she has created an “abstinence only from condoms” family that recklessly makes it its mission to ensure that there will be plenty of them, wanted or, as in the case of the last two, not.
Apparently, according to many of my fellow evangelicals, Palin could hold up a liquor store naked on a meth-binge just as long as she and her underage daughter keep pushing out the young’uns! According to Dobson, “The media are already trying to spin this as evidence Gov. Palin is a ‘hypocrite,’ but all it really means is that she and her family are human.”
But perhaps the biggest hypocrite in this story is Dobson. Is he now casting the issues of unwed pregnancy and teenage sex as inconsequential trifles, to be carelessly thrown under John McCain’s Straight Jacket Express? After all, he has quickly scolded unwed mothers in the past, showing a far less happy-go-lucky, “stuff happens” insouciance to “values.”
Imagine the horror and tut-tutting if Barack Obama had a pregnant daughter (well, that and the probable interest by the New England Journal of Medicine). Do you think Dobson would fawn over the news – perhaps, encourage Miss Obama to have a few more? Probably not. Remember how he famously lit into Mary Cheney for having a child without being married to a man? Now, wait. Does that mean that this isn’t partisan pandering after all, just saying whatever claptrap is needed to get a Republican to pick some more wild-about-fetuses Supreme Court justices? Oh, how foolish! What was I thinking? Mary, while a Republican, is, moreover, a homo. And, in evangelical circles, being a homosexual is about the only thing as potent as being pro-fetus: The former condemns with the ease the latter absolves.
http://bettybowers.com/betty4president/?p=118
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