The American Spectator

Political Hay

Bashing God by Dissing Sarah

By Jeffrey Lord on 9.16.08 @ 12:08AM

"I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level."
-- William F. Buckley

Take a listen.

The lines below from several recent attacks on Sarah Palin are as revealing as they are memorable.

Here's a sample:

* South Carolina Democratic Chairwoman Carol Fowler: John McCain has chosen a running mate "whose primary qualification seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion."

* Washington Post reporter Sally Quinn: "My first reaction was shock. Then anger. John McCain chose a running mate simply because she is a woman and one who appealed to the Republican's conservative evangelical base. McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate is a cynical and calculated move....I find it insulting to women, to the Republican party, and to the country.

* Actor Matt Damon: "I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago, that's an important...I want to know that. I really do. Because she's going to have the nuclear codes. I want to know if she thinks dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago. Or if she banned books or tried to ban books. We can't have that."

* Daily Kos blogger: "There are quite a number of extremely troubling links between Sarah Palin and neopentecostal dominionists -- enough that, in truth, she may be ultimately as much of a 'dream candidate' for the dominionist movement as Mike Huckabee was. Even worse, she's running in a manner that has been frighteningly successful for dominionist groups since the early 80's -- specifically, as a 'stealth candidate.'"

* MoveOn.org: "So Governor Palin is a staunch anti-choice religious conservative. She's a global warming denier...xxxx"

* Mark Benjamin, Salon.com: "With a disdain for science that alarms wildlife experts, Sarah Palin continues to promote Alaska's policy to gun down wolves from planes."

* Andrew Sullivan, the Atlantic: John McCain "threw caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the culture war as a last stand against Obama. That's all that is happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the Christianist base."

* Cindra Wilson, Salon.com: "Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms. What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right."

ALL OF THE ABOVE and so much more (there isn't room for the all the gallons of vitriol being tossed in Governor Palin's direction by the now Really VERY Angry Left) can be boiled down to the simple observation above made decades ago by Mr. Buckley (who had an assist in the thought from his friend and later National Review colleague, Yale Professor Willmoore Kendall).

This election is now being fought openly between, as Whittaker Chambers once described the same fight in a different era, "those who reject and those who worship God." Between those who believe "if man's mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is there for God?" -- and America's own Joan of Arc, Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin not only believes in God, she belongs, to the horror of her liberal critics, to the Assemblies of God, an evangelical church. For many liberals this is the equivalent of The Making of the President meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Worse she lives out in practice what Dr. Josh Moody, the senior pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in New Haven, calls, in his book by the same title, The God-Centered Life. Which is to say, in the now abruptly famous case of her Down syndrome son Trig, Palin knowingly refused to opt for an abortion. Nor did she respond to the news of her 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy with anything other than loving acceptance of a new life and encouragement of marriage. Twice over in two now ongoing and very public situations, Sarah Palin has focused on the love of God rather than herself. To those who have vested their life and career comfortably believing there is little need for God because what of what rolls around aimlessly in their heads and those of their like-minded friends at any given moment, to those who view government and the power of the state as an object of worship, this is taken as a serious, gut-level threat. A threat to the existence of their own very carefully structured non-religious secular value system.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
John McCain, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Business, Abortion, Environment, Global Warming, Books, Hollywood, Movies, Military, Alaska, Oil