My Sarah Palin post

Everyone who knows me knows that I could go on and on about pretty much anything under the sun. I could go on and on about all the stuff in the news cycle that's had to do with Sarah Palin. But I just want to make two quick observations. The first one seeks to be more comical even than it is observational and the second is much more principled.

I've heard a lot of people, especially those with anti-abortion political views tout that Sarah chose to have her son, Trig even though he has Down Syndrome as part of her "pro-life credentials." I think that's a joke. You can't have it both ways. If abortion is as wrong as this camp claims it is, you don't get bonus points for choosing not to abort a fetus. If abortions is murder, then it is not the kind of thing you pat yourself on the shoulder for avoiding. (Personally, I'll agree with the church's stand that it's much more ambiguous than that, especially as a matter of public policy.) To me, simultaneously maintaining that abortion is an absolute evil and praising Sarah Palin for not aborting her son sounds about as ludicrous as this. "I love Barack Obama. He is such a caring and charitable person who loves all people. As a matter of fact, I saw him driving down the road one day in Chicago and he really did something incredible. When a light turned red, he stopped. A tear came to eye as I looked and noticed that he had stopped even though there was a child with cerebral palsy in the crosswalk. What an inspirational man‽ He decided to let this child live even though it had a serious disability." You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

Here's the real point I want to emphasize about Sarah Palin though.  I could hardly care less about Bristol's pregnancy although I do find it comical that suddenly conservatives feel like women have a right to privacy where decisions about carrying a baby to term or aborting the fetus are concerned since that's the central legal question that Roe v. Wade is about and they're suddenly on the opposite side of it. No, the point I want to emphasize is that, if John McCain (heaven forbid) were to win the general election, Sarah Palin would be expected to take the following oath office:

"I, Sarah Palin, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God." (or some variation thereof)

As we consider anyone's candidacy, we should think about the way they will keep their oath. And Sarah Palin has a ridiculously bad black spot on her record where it comes to supporting and defending the Constitution.  As Time magazine reported, then-Wasilla-mayor, sarah Palin asked the librarian how she could go about banning books. Luckily, the librarian's response was that she absolutely would not cooperate with any effort to take books off the shelf. The librarian was later rewarded with a letter saying that she would be fired because Palin did not feel that she had her "full support." The librarian saved her job by publicly demonstrating her support. 

Some of you may, some of you may not know, but I want to be a librarian when I grow up. ... No, seriously. That's what I want to do with the next big chunk of my life, so this hits awful close to home for me. I like this statement from People for the American Way:

“People can disagree about a lot of things, but censorship is completely beyond the pale. Our democracy was founded on the belief that government shouldn’t tell people what kinds of books to read or what kind of beliefs to hold. No one with that kind of history should be anywhere near the White House. Sarah Palin needs to clarify her stance on freedom of speech immediately, and John McCain needs to explain why he chose a running mate with so little regard for the Constitution.”

I could not agree more. No one with that kind of record should be allowed into any elected office. That is precisely the kind of power that the government should never be allowed to have and exactly the reason that the Founding Fathers added the Bill of Rights. Being a librarian ought to be an incredibly apolitical position, and it sickens me to think that any elected official in this country would try to take books off the shelf (especially when the library only has a collection of 52,000 items). 

It should be noted that Sarah Palin claims that the conversation -- which she started at least twice -- was "rhetorical." I don't buy it one bit. Whether she was actually planning on banning books is certainly ambiguous. I don't think there's any way to slice this that makes her look like a good, reasonable person. It seems quite clear that she would have had no problem with books being pulled from the libraries and probably would have sided with the book censors over the library. 

I was already very firmly in the Obama camp, but it's hard for me to imagine an opposition ticket that I could be more adamantly against with the addition of a Veep candidate who has previously spat in the face of something that I hold so dear.

Sarah Palin really does need to explain herself and/or apologize for her previous attacks on the United States Bill of Rights before she can swear again to support and defend it. It's disgusting enough that a governor has this kind of record and has lied through her teeth to make a similar oath to the Constitution.