Women Against Sarah Palin

Since the Women Against Sarah Palin blog is in the midst of a deluge of contributions and I was unsatisfied after signing this online petition, I thought I'd start by posting my own perspective here.

I am here at my kitchen table writing while my daughter is at school not just because my husband is supporting us but also because of the women before me, women like Helen Keller and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Shirley Chisholm and Susan B. Anthony and Hillary Clinton and my grandmother and my mother too. Women who had to fight longer and harder and against greater odds than most men ever do for what they believed in. Women who had to prove themselves on top of doing the work.

That's why I'm not so thrilled to look up and see that the GOP has anointed Palin the new queen of the right. With all the privileges and perquisites of good fortune but little to no interest nor awareness of history (defining herself as a "hockey mom" and saying "I never wanted to be in public service" are telling confessions), she doesn't seem like a head of state, nor a compassionate leader heralding the arrival of women in the upper tiers of this country's government.

I don't believe that someone who wants to teach creationism in the public schools or who wants to deny women their right to reproductive choice has a proper appreciation of the separation of church and state. Someone who wants to ban books from her school library, and who would educate kids on abstinence only but not offer them contraception is shockingly oblivious to the way the world works today (has she talked with her own daughter lately?). And her less-than-cavalier attitudes toward her city's intellectual and artistic offerings as mayor of Wasilla, as well as her take-no-prisoners management style, don't bode well either.

I beg to differ with Palin that polar bears are not endangered (she must not have watched Arctic Tale). I find it hard to take her seriously when I know she shoots animals from cars and planes for sport. That's just so wrong on so many levels. And then she has the gall to fall for the global-warning denialists' arguments that humans aren't a factor in global warning. Tina Fey's line about that in her SNL parody was great: "It's just God giving us a big squeeze."

So my response to her is just what Miss Manners recommends when you must decline something offered to you that you absolutely do not want: "No, I couldn't possibly." This is what I say to Sarah Palin -- and to John McCain for choosing a second-in-command with this particular constellation of unsustainable values, morals, and ethics, with this lack of compassion for our planet and all its inhabitants, now and into the future.

I couldn't possibly accept a leadership that disdains our planet's future and would continue to consolidate power in the hands of those with the deepest pockets, leaving everyone else to fend for the scraps, like the rape victims in Wasilla who were asked to pay for their own examination kits when Palin was mayor. I could not possibly accept this. I urge you to stand up for your beliefs by voting, by arguing with the denialists, and by carefully considering our future here on earth. Otherwise I fear we'll end up just like those immobilized, saturated Wall-E colonists, cut off from what we love most and unable to do anything about it. Speak now, speak loud. And thank a woman who broke ground for you.