Halloween is here. My kids are all a-twitter with their plans for costumes, scary makeup and multicolor hair. I generally love this holiday but these days I am actually too scared and distracted to focus on Halloween's ghouls, when it feels like I am watching one attempting to take over the White House.
Is this some toilet paper-tossing hoax on the American people? Has this costumed marauder been mistakenly wheeled out for our mere amusement and ridicule on late night shows? I think not. For starters, we know it cost $150,000 to create the proper visual illusion (and that’s not counting the glam hair and make-up). That’s a pretty hefty price tag for mere costuming. When the result is so good looking and yet so noxious, suspicions are duly roused as to what lies beneath the very slick hockey-mom surface.
This hockey mom doesn’t hail from the same cloth as moms I know. These moms are there to drive their kids, to see after homework, heartbreaks and healthy snacks. They care that their kids do better, not just on the field of play, but in their personal lives as well. These moms act as an assist to kids enroute to colleges, careers and hopefully happy lives, where they are more likely to succeed, because mom took the time to be there for them.
In contrast, our masked hockey mom has a slightly different agenda. Here's the list: First child? Shipped off for sacrifice in Iraq. Second child? Sacrificed on the false alter of "abstinence" and dragged unmercifully through the gutter of public opinion for her sins, conveniently clearing her mother of other suspicions in the process. Now Bristol is banished from the game with the worst possible penalty. Pregnant with an unwanted child and doomed to unhappiness in a premature and most likely shot-gun marriage (think the whole NRA). Yet another infant child was sacrificed in the womb but nevertheless brought to term to suffer both Downs Syndrome and maternal neglect, for what? To be a prop in his mother’s career-advancing photo ops? This is not mothering, this is religious ideology and political ambition taken to an extreme, at the price of one’s loved ones. It is impossible not to feel for these kids, their personal tragedies, not just that their mother seems unconcerned that none are actually pointed towards college, but that they are suffering pubic humiliation to make ideologic points, all while being carted around on the campaign trail. Mere h uman props for the hockey mom masquerade.
To those of us who care about the <span style="font-style:italic;">actual</span> welfare of our family members, this treatments feels like religious fanaticism incongruently dubbed "family values" by a gross contortion of logic and spin wizardry. The dank stench of this personal hypocrasy seems to have first seeped out in the small town of Wasalia back in 2002, when Hockey Mom made clear to all that "family" was not her priority. When mother-in-law, Faye Palin, decided to run for town mayor, a position vacated when Sarah termed out, she might naturally expect to receive the support of her incumbent daughter-in-law. No. Not only didn’t this happen but Sarah actively threw her support to another religious ideologue who shared her anti-choice "passion." A painted finger was pointed at the hapless mother, and the label "Baby Killer" was slurred against her in the community. She lost decisively as a result. No so pretty, huh?
Okay, so this good-looking, plain-talking candidate is capable of stabbing her mother-in-law in the back. Let’s not worry about these petty details. Let's just put aside the messy matters of the flesh and family and talk about principles. Sarah’s supporters argue vehemently that she is both entitled to and capable of attaining to the highest positions of power in the US. Here, at least, we can agree on part of that premise (joined by generations of suffragettes, women’s libers, feminists, progressives and now, apparently, desperate Evangelicals). Men and women, while different, are entitled to equal opportunity and equal respect under the law. This is the basic argument of feminists and while our standards of capability may differ, we enthusiastically agree on this basic principle. We will happily make room for you rightwinger feminist converts on the wagon.
Unfortunately, there is one small gripe that we reluctantly raise. You seem to forget that to get women to this glorious point in history, where one of us can run for president and another can be selected as a running mate to a president, generations of us have fought on your behalf. It has taken decades to remove cultural and legal taboos, political and economic arguments and push back on religious extremists who refused to accept that women should be supported in making their own choices (which they would do regardless).
We are only here now, giving this Sarah this stage, because our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and great, great-grandmothers saw to it that we had these combined rights. They understood that to give women true access to social equality, they needed all these rights and they are inseparable. Education, economic and legal parity, access to health care, religious free and choice all go together. These rights exist for all of us and our daughters today because they have been written with the blood of our foremothers.
Yet, Sarah, here you are, dressed up and winking at the camera, sitting proudly on the shoulders of the very matriarchs who battled for you to have this opportunity. What is that? Would you stab them in the heart to deprive other woman and your own daughter of the knowledge, choices and rights you have ably exploited to be here. One wonders what is afoot, when lipstick and Armani are the tools for the desecration of the graves of our ancestors. Certainly this is not merely a form of prankish political "Trick or Treating." No, my friends, this is seriously scary stuff that keeps moms like me awake at night.
Those that fail to understand why Sarah Palin does not appeal to more women, fail to appreciate the concept of enfranchisement. Suffragettes like Emily Wilding Davison fought not merely for the right of women to vote, but for the right of women to be governed by like representatives. In Hillary Clinton, we had a woman who clearly understood the many paradoxes of women’s lives. Our battles both within ourselves to know what is right and in our efforts to hold our own in an outside world that does not always do right by us. To cut our chosen paths in life, when we are also community oriented. To balance intertwining and sometimes conflicting relationships as sisters, wives, mothers, lovers, daughters, colleagues and friends, while remaining true to our private values, whatever those are. We each live our own life the best we can. Hillary appreciated and valued her rights and thus the rights of others to choose and so we respect her. Sarah Palin, whose path is completely strewn with the bodies of those whose views have differed, has no intellectual appreciation for principles of tolerance, human rights or even diversity of beliefs or styles. Her mind seems relatively vacant beyond her surety of her own faith-based choices. This type of religious and social intolerance, when at its absolute worst, results in mob-crazy witch trials, vigilante lynchings and McCarthy-esque paranoia, riffs of which are already in full view at her raucous rallies. Is this horrific specter really where we, as Americans, want to go?
I think not. In the clear light of day, Palin’s high-priced disguise and the party's resurgent Evangelicals’ rouse to turn back the clock on human rights in America is not working. The pancake powder and rouge can’t mask the ugliness and lingering stench of her religious extremism. Women with their eyes open see through this and the putrid smell is unmistakable.
Except, apparently, to small cadre of what we can think of as the living dead. There you find "Joe Six Pack," who previously shot himself by accident, we think, after attempting to clean his gun with his beer and a plumbing snake. There you find women like Patricia Giebink, who performed abortions in South Dakota, before "seeing the light" to launch Measure 11 and others with vendettas based upon personal regrets (for wrongly made personal choices) like her. You find quite a few people for whom Bible thumping is their main form of communication. And others who hang out in their places of worship with no apparent ability for autonomous thought beyond the rapture of "faith." These folks love a good hymn: so what if "Drill, Baby, Drill" doesn’t quite rhyme, there is rapture in unholy profits, if only for the few.
With relief, it seems the specter of Sarah in the White House is mere nightmare material. Though her time in the spotlight shone a bright light on a segment of the American political landscape, normally not seen, now know to be lurking in dark, steepled caverns on the edges of political acceptability. Sarah truly represents these sullen life forms who cling to faith not for spiritual enhancement but for their entire world view. They accept whatever their churches ordain for them and they always have. They may not like their lot in life, but since they can’t be bothered to stay in school or work hard, they tend to leave the hard work of building a better life to new immigrants and minorities. They see no problem with leaving their kids with less opportunities than they had themselves: that’s why they have more kids. They begrudge the successes of others who believe in do achieve the American dream. They don't dream other than to indulge their smug faith that these inequities will all be sorted in the tidal wave of the second coming that they’ve been promised as their reward.
If the polls are to be believed, it seems increasingly unlikely that this ideologic monster in the chic, designer outfits represents much of a current threat to recent decades of progress in civil, human and womens' rights. Unfortunately, after the election, we know that it will be highly likely that we will continue to fend off assaults on our intellects and institutions coming from Sarah and her creationist cohorts, who lead on the seedy edge of cultural decline. We suspect that there will be many sinister efforts to unleash their repressive forces in the future. Hopefully, good people will always rise up to cast votes to send away these demons for yet another few years.