--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > The biggest problem we have with her is not people making > sexist comments. That distraction is appropriate to any > woman here who is being treated that way in her own personal > life.
I want to comment first on this subsidiary point, because in its more general form, this theme has come up for you a number of times here. The paradigmatic response to this approach is the famous poem that begins "First they came for the Jews..." Obviously sexist attacks on Palin are vanishingly trivial compared to the Holocaust, but the larger point may not be. Another version of the point is Cain's question from the Bible, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Is it ethically OK to refrain from defending someone who is being unfairly attacked when one doesn't have a personal investment in the quality or characteristic on which the attack focuses? Is one absolved of responsibility in such a case? Do we consider all the white people who participated in civil rights activities in the South in the '60s and '70s to have been *inappropriately* distracted by the racism they were opposing, because they themselves had never experienced it? <snip> > So my advise to the press and the Democratic party is to ignore > all the word shields being used to keep you from sandblasting > Sara Palin from head to toe. I want you so far up her ass I > only see the heels of your shoes. I will forgive you if you > need to apologize afterwards for being a little rough on her. > We don't have the time to play nice and she can take it if she > is the real deal. But I will never forgive you if let he slip > by with little scrutiny and she turns out to be another George > Bush disaster. Another way of looking at this is to ask whether obsessing over Sarah Palin may have the unintended consequence of allowing John McCain to slip by with little scrutiny--not only because there's a great deal to be scrutinized about him, but also because a significant portion of the electorate may *not* be willing to graciously forgive us for being "rough" on her, and their outrage may inspire them to vote for the McCain- Palin ticket in protest (which was Michael Moore's point). And of course these two points are related. If we spend all our energy deconstructing Sarah while neglecting to do the same for McCain, those who are moved to protest our treatment of her by voting for the Republican ticket won't have been given any reason *not* to. Finally, objections from the left to the sexist attacks on Palin are not "word shields" designed to protect her from scrutiny. They're objections to sexism, period; the notion that we simply cannot do a proper job on her without some sexism creeping in is just a rationalization for indulging in misogyny. And as an aside, frankly, I find it difficult to imagine that if she were a man with the same (lack of) experience and the same personal characteristics, she would exercise quite the same fascination over the supporters of the opposition. > Oh yeah, and the fact that she did not try to shove her wacky > beliefs about creationism being taught alongside intelligent > design down the throats of her independently oriented fellow > Alaskans doesn't help the fact that she equates these two > completely different positions as having equal scientific merit. Actually, she's never said she thinks they have equal scientific merit. For that matter, she's never said she thinks the two are mutually exclusive. There are scientists and religionists who understand the two views as compatible. We don't know enough about her religious and scientific views to say whether she might be one of them. > Houston we have a big F'n problem here. What you're saying, in essence, is that we need to have a religious litmus test for the presidency. The real F'n problem is that this cuts both ways: The folks who like Sarah Palin could just as well demand (and some have) that only committed fundamentalist/ evangelical Christians be entitled to the presidency.
