Sarah Palin: Not Conservative Enough for Creationists

Dear Conservative Christians:

Sarah Palin does not openly espouse young earth creationism. Stay at home this year! Let the GOP know you won’t be taken for granted any longer! Let Obama – Biden win, in 4 years, the GOP will BEG for Huckabee. Please?

Cry, Hemant, cry!

Thanks very much for the link. I am feasting, feasting on Friendly Atheist leftovers. (I was going to use a backwash metaphor, but that seemed a bit much….d’oh!)

HJ

“teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”

Shouldn’t she be saying “all” instead of “both”? If the Biblical creation myth should be taught in Alaskan public school science classes, then out of fairness and in the fearless pursuit of information shouldn’t the Aleut and the Tlingit creation myths be taught as well, along with the couple dozen other Alaskan native creation myths? Then there are the thousands of other creation myths around the world. After all, we shouldn’t be afraid of information.

With all that there might not be time to get around to empirical based science. Oh well, it’s just as well. Science turns good Christian kids into atheists anyway. If we need good science that actually does things we can just buy it from the Chinese.

Laugh, dude, laugh. After all those years of using an elephant as a symbol, the Republican Party has finally become a circus.

Just in case you haven’t heard these rumours yet…

Sarah Palin may not be the mother of her fifth child.

Some are suggesting the child is actually her grandson and the son of her 16 year old daughter. The details are in the link above but here’s a summary.

Palin was 7 months pregnant when she announced her pregnancy, and no one had any idea she was pregnant at all. A month later the baby was born weighing over 6 pounds despite being a full month premature.

Palin’s daughter, on the other hand, had been taken out of school for 8 months because of mono.

On one hand, we shouldn’t really care. This is a private matter of the family and none of anyone else’s business.

On the other hand, no doubt her religion fostered the kind of environment where she felt the need to lie (if it is indeed a lie) to protect her family’s “reputation.” Is this the kind of person anyone wants potentially leading the free world?

I don’t care if her kids are biologically her own. If that story is true, it makes me sad that she thinks she has to lie.

The only legitimate concern people should have about candidates having things in their past that they are embarrassed or ashamed of is probably not the things themselves but the potential for blackmail. I couldn’t care less about Palin’s daughter’s love life. That has nothing to do with Palin’s qualifications for leadership. But if she subscribes to a mentality of shame about such things then she is vulnerable to anyone who could influence her with a threat of exposure.

If indeed she has gone through an elaborate deception to mislead the public about being the mother of the child in question, the concern we should have is about how poor her judgement was in choosing that way rather than in coming clean about the situation.

This looks spurious to me, not to mention irrelevant. Mothers over 40 are far more likely to have Down’s syndrome babies than young women are.

The fact that she carried the pregnancy very discretely is not unheard of, particularly for long-waisted, athletic type women. And the idea that she flew home to deliver with her own doctor in her local hospital – while unusual – doesn’t seem unbelievable to me. It was her fifth pregnancy and by that time, mothers are pretty relaxed about giving birth and quite familiar with how much time they have to labor.

I’m with Karen. When I heard how young the baby was and thought how freaking elderly she was from a birthin’ standpoint, no, it’s hers. She made a bad reproductive decision and I wouldn’t have her dictating national women’s health policy if John McCain goes up to the big cooler in the sky. There are real issues that libs (if you are so inclined) can hold her feet to the fire over. Don’t go all Mulder on me and start pulling X-Files outcher butt. Libs need to take a real loo at real issues and really put these two in the ground.

HJ

If it’s not hers (big if), it’s just a white lie, as long as she doesn’t want to take away the rights of other women to make their own choices.

Oh, wait. She does.

The last few years have shown Republicans to be hypocrites when it comes to moral issues, so if it was not her baby, she’s in good company.

If it’s not hers (I agree, big if)…

I would definitely call this more than a white lie. If she is this bastion of morality she’s made out to be, her own family “transgressions” are merely being covered up with lies. What kind of lies will she be willing to concoct when her administration does something really bad?

Wouldn’t this also make her a bad mother? Bristol (the 16 year old, who in a recent picture seems to be sporting a Wedding Ring) has probably already faced more scrutiny and embarrassment than any other teenage mother. Perhaps second only to Mary herself. Is it Bristol who is now suffering for her mother’s ambition? Would there have been nearly the same attention if Bristol was initially identified as the mother?

There are also pictures floating around of Palin during a past pregnancy. She was huge. Stark contrast to these recent pictures.

Birth announcement in the paper Note the date and hospital.

Birth announcement calendar from Mat-Su hospital. Note Palin’s name is absent.

All circumstantial evidence, but there is a fair bit of it.

Again, it really is none of our business. Had Palin not been McCain’s VP choice, it really wouldn’t be any of our business.

But, do we have a right to know any personal details of public figures in such a high office? Is there a line somewhere? Does it matter if the personal details are perceived to affect the person’s ability to perform the responsibilities of their office? On which side of the line would something like this fall?

On some level, if this is a lie, it is a lie being told because of her religious views.

Unlike most political scandals, this one is very easy to disprove, with just a blood test. Considering what the Republicans have to lose from this, if the blood test results are not forthcoming, that would strongly suggest to me that the rumor is true. I’m absolutely not saying Sarah Palin has any responsibility or duty to disprove it, I’m just saying that if she doesn’t, it’s probably because she can’t.

As far as the objections above – while it’s more likely to happen with an older mom, most cases are from mothers younger than 35, and this could be one. It’s true that some women don’t show much, but pictures of her from earlier pregnancies show that she is not one of those women. And while fifth-time mothers may be more relaxed, I’m not seeing any mother all that relaxed about a premature baby.

This isn’t even close to X-Files or conspiracy theory stuff. This used to happen in this country all the time, and still does. I can completely see a traditional family deciding to handle this the old-fashioned way and a small closely-knit town helping with what would seem like a harmless deception for a good cause. I can especially see this happening in Alaska, which very much has that kind of mentality.

No one could have foreseen the national spotlight being turned on the Palins. It’s just their bad luck that this one time it does matter to people outside their family. I’m not faulting her for trying to save her daughter’s ‘reputation’, if that is what is going on, but if it is, I am faulting her for having the insanely bad judgement to think she could get away with it during a presidential campaign. That would be poor judgement on an epic scale for someone next in line to be president, and that makes it everybody’s business.

Well, now it turns out that 17-year-old Bristol is pregnant for reals
and will be marrying the baby’s father.

This is unfortunately the outcome (teen pregnancy) in many fundamentalist Christian families where “abstinence only” is taught and teenagers are not informed about birth control.

A blog with a name like “Happy Jihad’s House Of Pancakes” is worth checking out.

I read on Yahoo that Palin is saying that she is the mother of the fifth child, AND that her daughter is pregnant and will marry the father. She got knocked up at the age of 16. She also asked that everyone respect the family’s privacy.

Typical conservative BS. They go around telling everybody else what to do, but when one of their own messes up, all of a sudden it’s a private matter.

Karen, I thought the same thing.

Yes, the pregnancy thing is a personal family matter. However, we’re evaluating her for a position in which her job is taking an interest in our personal lives. I think it’s more than appropriate for her to face the same scrutiny she would be able to put us under.

Doesn’t America have real problems? Like the war, economy, unemployment, and health care to name a few. For a country that places SO much value on religious righteousness, you would think they have all the other issues figured out. New rule, US politicians are not to be asked or answer any questions regarding religion as it is not a priority to get the country back on it’s feet. The belief in a god will not fix the problems of the country no matter how much the conservative right wing nut jobs think it will.