Thursday, September 11, 2008

Newest slam on Palin: She's not really a woman

That's right. Thanks to Rod Dreher for pointing out this interesting article by Wendy Doniger at the Washington Post's On Faith:
Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.
Oh brother. And I love Dreher's retort:
Well, useful to get that learnt. If there's anybody I trust to define womanhood and to be sympathetic to the lives of working-class women, it's a divinity school professor in Chicago who has constructed womanhood ideologically.
Just more evidence that the reason they don't like Palin is the shattering of their ridiculous illusion that the women of this country really share their feminist resentment of Western civilization

The article is also interesting as a good example of all of the liberal shibboleths about Palin:
But I object strongly when anyone (and especially anyone with political power) tries to take their theology out in public, to inflict those private religious (or sexual) views on other people. In both sex and religion (which combine in the debates about abortion), Sarah Palin's views make me fear that the Republican party has finally lost its mind.
Where did Palin bring up religion? It seems to me that it is people like Doniger who are constantly bringing it up--and then only to bash other people over their heads with it. Isn't it strange that is the people who charge other with being obsessed with religion who are really the ones obsessed with it?
As for sex, the hypocrisy of her outing her pregnant daughter in front of millions of people, hard on the heels of her concealing her own pregnancy (her faith in abstinence applying, apparently, only to non-Palins), is nicely balanced by her hypocrisy in gushing with loving support of her teenage daughter after using a line-item veto to cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers in Alaska.
Outing her pregnant daughter? The woman was being attacked for supposedly covering up her daughter's pregnancy of Trig. Was she supposed to think they weren't going to go after her daughter for really being pregnant? Does it matter that she actually increased the funding for the transitional home for teenagers rather than reducing it?

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