It’s like an African American saying “No thanks, civil rights and integration aren’t for me!”

On one gloomy, god-forsaken Friday John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate for the 2008 election. In all reality, I don’t think it was a gloomy day. I’m pretty sure it was sunny actually (at least in Dallas it was), but I feel a sense of gloom and doom when I think back to that day. In actuality, Sarah Palin’s specific form of crazy scares the shit out of me.

This is what I know about Sarah Palin. She’s a woman and fairly attractive. I state this first not because it’s the most important factor but because I was sent a text message that Friday saying “McCain’s VP is kinda hot…” I was at work at the time of the announcement so this is actually how I found out who the McCain had chosen. But the sense of gloom hadn’t quite set it because I didn’t know much about her. I, initially, was angry because I felt McCain pulled Palin from the middle of nowhere (probably from the “Bridge to Nowhere”) because she had a vagina. Its insulting for the McCain campaign even think that true Hillary supporters would even flirt with the idea of voting McCain simply because his VP is a woman. And any true Hillary supporter wouldn’t agree with Sarah Palin on much. I will go as far to say that a true Hillary supporter would run the other direction when Palin was chosen, because her shit is scary. This is what scares me about her:
• She’s a woman but she opposes choice for women. Easily said for a woman who can afford to have five children and has probably lived a life of privilege.
• She’s a member of the NRA. Or maybe she just has guns. It scares me when ANYONE has a gun. Even police officers. Because, ultimately, we’re all human and prone to emotion and passion.
• She believes abstinence is the only birth control. She is right that it is type of birth control that is 100% effective unless you’re Virgin Mary. Her abstinence policy, while moral in some ways, isn’t effective or realistic. She knows that now first hand with a pregnant teenage daughter.

Sarah Palin offers an interesting and terrifying problem for women if she were to get elected. She would hold the second-most powerful position in the United States and that would be BIG for women. But during her reign, she would likely try to take away fundamental rights of women, including the right to choose. If someone personally chooses to have an abortion then it is, obviously, their choice. If someone could not bear that burden and decides to have that baby then they too are choosing a certain life for themselves. And if someone has a religious opposition to choice, fine. I get. But that doesn’t mean someone’s religious beliefs should be coerced onto a young woman who was date-raped.

This is fracking America people. Our fracking country was founded because people who were facing religious persecution. America was supposed to be a place where people could freely practice your religion without fear. Well, much of our country was founded on the idea that we could do things without fear. And now we live in a culture of fear. Hypocritical much?

And now a conundrum to close:
Hypothetically speaking (and this certainly wouldn’t be the case, but perhaps her self-importance would allow her to think that it is…) let’s say Sarah Palin is the best thing since sliced bread…politically speaking. Let’s say she’s the best VP our country has ever seen. Unemployment is down, civil rights are being afforded to all, socially speaking we’re thriving and internationally we’ve finally pulled our head out of our collective ass. Hypothetically speaking. And then in the midst of all of her success she gets pregnant again (god knows she doesn’t believe in contraception). It would be her sixth and she would, undoubtedly, be getting older. It is after all what we call aging, as much as many Americans try to deny it. Any pregnancy after 35 is practically high risk. In your 40s those odds just get worse. What if she got pregnant again and she knew that having this baby would kill her? What if she knew that all her hypothetical progress would go down the drain the moment she died? What should she do? Help us all? Or save herself from her guilt and her God?

***Note: This is not at all what I intended this posting to be about. I found myself writing an intro to a post that will soon follow but it appears that once I started, I just couldn’t help myself. Can you really blame me?