While I don’t often rant about politics, there are times when I just cannot help myself. Politicians are people, too, and I try to look at them with compassion because I know what’s it like to try to please a group of people who at times all want very different things from me. Politicians are similar to pastors in that their constituency feels a sense of ownership or as though they are the employers. Most of the time I can empathize to an extent, even with the politicians with whom I disagree the most. My true confession is that I was unable to feel compassion toward George W. Bush and I am equally unable to feel compassion toward Sarah Palin. While I am not proud of my absolute lack of compassion toward these two human beings, I am also aware that it comes from a place of deep compassion for those whose lives they have torn asunder. While George W. Bush’s atrocities are more obvious because of the length of his term as POTUS, Sarah Palin’s are the ones I would like to highlight.
As a woman in a profession that is still largely a man’s world, I am incensed by Palin’s insistence upon representing herself as an intelligent woman, capable of leading this country. If she wants to be taken seriously, she needs to learn when to choose silence over speech, when to say she does not know, and when to say she was wrong. Her inability to do any of those contributes to her foolishness which results in people wanting to pat her on the head and tell her she’s real cute, as though she’s still four years old. That is exactly what intelligent women have been working to change for the past 60 years. When she misspoke about Paul Revere, the mature and intelligent avenue would have been to simply say she made a mistake. The media would have let it go at that and perhaps that is why she continued to insist that what she said was true. Maybe she is just a supreme manipulator which is also not doing anything to help the image of women.
The other group of which I am a part that she has harmed in a variety of ways is the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Palin is against gay marriage and has publicly said homosexuality is a choice. She claims at the same time not to have anything againt the gay community and says she doesn’t judge us. The problem is she is in a position to influence a great number of people (as surprising as that is) and her stance against gay marriage tells people she believes my love for my wife is somehow lesser than her love for her husband (scary thought, that). Her comment about the fact that she wouldn’t “choose” to be gay is not just ignorant but destructive. Think of all of the parents of teenagers who are gay who hear a comment like that and feel justified in sending their teenager to a gay reparative therapy camp. The harm done at those camps is sometimes never undone. You can’t imagine the painful conversations I have had with people who went through that experience earlier in their lives. She makes comments like that with no thought regarding the repercussions. Or, maybe she’s fooling us and is making those comments hoping for the repercussions…
If I had my way, Sarah Palin would be honest about the fact that she wants to be an entertainer and make lots of money and stop pretending she wants to be a serious contender as a leader of this country. Even I could deal with her as an entertainer because she will do much less harm if people know not to take her seriously. Those of us in California learned the hard way about mistaking entertainers for politicians. We should lead the way in warning the rest of the country.