Sarah Palin, Woman-Blaming and Feminist Cluelessness About Conservative Christianity
Nov 21st, 2008 by admin
I have been intending to write a post about the way so many feminists, leftists, liberals and progressives consummately misunderstand conservative Christianity and conservative Christian women in particular. I keep feeling overwhelmed by this writing project and so deciding against it. But given the across-the-board anger among women over the misogyny of the 2008 Presidential elections, it seems important to me to at least begin to take a stab at offering some of my thoughts in the interests of working towards uniting women, bringing women together, something that is not going to be possible so long as feminists simply, again, don’t get conservative Christian women (and too often don’t even try because despite all the evidence to the contrary, they think they know.)
During the 2008 election campaigns the staggering amounts of misunderstanding, misinformation, disinformation and absolute hogwash circulating about Sarah Palin and her connections with conservative Christianity were startling and, honestly, shocking to me. Cluelessness reigned, with all sorts of people claiming Palin was a “dominionist,” a “reconstructionist,” a stealth member of various kinds of secret, fascist Christian cabals and cults, and you name it. There was little to no concern for facts or for accuracy; worse, leftists, progressives, you name it, just spouted off randomly, continually, without bothering to do a bare minimum of homework, you know, talk to folks, talk to dominionists and reconstructionists and theoretically secret-cabal-and-cult-members, or if not that, at least read their writings, which are available in superfluity, in abundance, nay, in a GLUT, all over the internet. I’ve come to expect leftist and liberal men to spout off without doing any research. For the most part they are the most arrogant, bombastic, wearisome know-it-alls on the face of the earth, and it doesn’t even occur to them that they might not know everything and might should check a few things out. But I would have expected that feminist women would do some research so far as what a woman Vice-Presidential candidate actually believed, as opposed to similarly spouting off. We are talking about women here, and feminist women theoretically are concerned about women and about their relationships with and connections with all women. If they aren’t, then honestly, I give up. Because how will we ever make revolution without these connections and relationships?
A stellar example of the aforementioned cluelessness phenomenon was Naomi Wolf’s bizarre essay posted to the Huffington Post. Shortly before the elections, with a straight face and in all sincerity, Wolf wrote (and HuffPo published!) (cue Rhoda with the blonde shiny braids from the 1956 (horribly misogynist and chillingly relevant to the misogyny of the 2008 elections) horror movie The Bad Seed playing Au Claire de la Lune on the piano):
Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah “Evita” Palin.You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state…
… the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them…
Palin, not McCain, is the FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal… a new report shows that there are dozens of Bush and Rove operatives surrounding Sarah Palin and orchestrating her every move.
…Under the Palin-Rove police state, you will see escalating infringements on your access to a free internet:
“Sarah Palin was baptized at Wasilla Assembly of God…Last Sunday our research team released a video, a ten-minute mini-documentary, focusing on the Wasilla Assemblies of God and the video seemed on the verge of a massive “viral” breakthrough when YouTube pulled it down, citing ‘inappropriate content’. At the point the video was censored by YouTube it had been viewed by almost 160,000 people. The short of it is that YouTube has censored a video documentary that appeared to be close to having an effect on a hard fought and contentious American presidential election…”
…Do you think that spying like this will ever end under a Palin-Rove regime? Dream on. If she and McCain are elected, then every single strategy memo and speech and debate prep note from every opposition candidate from now and on into forever will be read by the regime in power while it is still in the computers of the challengers.
With modern technology, there really is less place to hide from the state than there was in East Germany in the Cold War era. I remember feeling a chill: of course. That is the wave of the future once we breach the protections around citizens of FISA and the fourth amendment. That way lies the abyss for us all.
…Am I trying to scare you? I am. I am trying to scare you to death and ask you to scare your Republican and independent friends most of all.
Wait though, hold up. What about, like, Michael Moore and Bowling for Columbine? I thought as good leftists and progressives and feminists, we were all agreed that fear-mongering was so 1990s, so ignorant, so conservative Christian, so Bush Republican and we were so done with all of that and so above it all? (Not only that, everybody I know, including me, saw the video from the Wasilla Assembly of God so I don’t even know what she’s talking about, and if there was such suppression of what she wrote on the internet, how is it that she’s got this essay up on the HuffPo?)
Wolf moves on to accuse McCain/Palin and their various operatives of messing with her e-mail accounts, corrupting her bank accounts and stealing money out of them, making her money transfers vanish, all the way up to opening her daughter’s report cards and then resealing them (no, kids never do anything like that when they are worried about their report cards), concluding (swell Au Claire de la Lune):
I am not telling you this because it’s about my life. I am telling you this because it is about your life –whoever you are…History shows that nothing portects you in a police state. This is not about my fear and anxiety: it is about what awaits you and everyone you love unless you see this for what it is:
Make no mistake: Sarah “Evita” Palin is Rove and Cheney’s cosmetic rebranding of their fascist push: she will help to establish a true and irreversible “fear society” in this once free once proud nation. For God’s sake, do not let her; do not let them.
I know (and hope!) this might seem to some of you — as it did to me — like a bizarre joke, but it wasn’t. Wolf honestly wrote this. HuffPo honestly published it. People read it and for the most part, took it seriously. Honestly, this whole election process has been such a fork in the road for me in so many ways because of phenomena like this!
Now, consider what the actual dominionists, reconstructionists, conservative and otherwise legitimately scary Christians were writing about Sarah Palin during this same time period in which this ridiculous essay was published on the internet. Essays of the kind I’m about to quote were all over the place. All anyone had to do was pull up Google, enter “Sarah Palin Christian”, and take her pick of hundreds and thousands of links with sentiments similar to what I’ve posted below in what came to be known as the “Palin Dilemma” debate amongst evangelicals, reformed, and otherwise conservative Christians. (Note: Einwechter and Phillips, whom I quote, were members of the group of Christians responsible for my national excommunication in 1994 and 1995. Phillips, matter of fact, publicly pronounced me a “Jezebel” more than once.)(All bolds mine.)
Sarah Palin identifies herself with the anti-Christian philosophy of feminism. She uses feminist terminology, identifies with feminist political objectives, publicly praises liberal icons of the feminist movement, and has built her lifestyle around the feminist ideal of motherhood and careerism. She represents the feminist lie that a woman can do it all; that she can be a wife and mother and pursue a full-time career outside of her home and still meet all her responsibilities in the home. She personifies the feminist image of the tough, take-charge woman who is fitted to rule and govern in any sphere she chooses. She establishes the feminist principle that if a woman can do something, and she wants to do it, she ought to do it; there should be no constraints placed on her by her family, her church, or her society. She validates the feminist notion that it is fine for a mother to leave the care and training of her children in the hands of others while she seeks her own version of success in the world. Sarah Palin has brought to light the degree to which feminist ideology has triumphed in American culture and in the American church.
— Reconstructionist William Einwechter in Vision Forum
“. . . the widespread acceptance of a pro-life professing Christian Republican, self-proclaimed feminist mother of an infant and four children as a candidate for the highest office of the land is the single most dangerous event for the conscience of the Christian community of the last ten years at least. The IQ of the Christian community has dropped 50 points. In order to win an election they have sold the core of what is right and true about the defining issue of our generation—the family! Once this threshold is passed, it will be virtually impossible apart from widespread repentance to recapture this ground.”
– Doug Phillips quoted by William Einwechter in the same link
From a post entitled “What the Bible tells us about Sarah Palin’s future — American feminism has triumphed — even on the religious right”:
Since the Republican Party suffered widespread defeat on Election Day, the GOP faithful have been debating whether the party should move to the proverbial political center or embrace the conservativism of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. What has gone unnoticed is that support for Palin is a repudiation of the Bible.
… The power of the belief that women are not eligible to lead came crashing into religious living rooms in September when more than 100 Christian bookstores, run by the Southern Baptist Convention, refused to publicly display an edition of Gospel Today magazine that featured five female pastors on the cover. The magazine had to be withdrawn from public display, said a spokesman, because the story “clearly advocates a position contrary to our denomination’s statement of faith.” Christians could only get the magazine by asking for it from behind the counter, a la Penthouse or Playboy.
How could it be that a female in the White House was acceptable at the same time that females at the pulpit posed a problem?
…politically inconvenient passages from the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy … make clear that men, not women, should rule…The charitable Christian will leave aside the implications of this injunction for Palin’s notorious $150,000 clothes shopping spree, and ask how biblical fundamentalists can accept Timothy’s teachings and still celebrate a female politician skilled in forthright rhetoric.
…The answer is: Not very easily.
For those who believe that there is an all-encompassing plan by God as delivered in the Scripture, the complementarian view is fundamental. The belief in specific gender roles with men being in leadership positions over women cannot be separated from the order that the Bible says God created…
— Link from the blog Essential Estrogen
From a blog post entitled “Sarah Palin: Biblical Womanhood vs. Feminism and the Implications for America”:
But as much as Sarah Palin might be a supporter of the right to life, she is an enemy of Biblical womanhood. She’s cloaked in a sheepskin of conservatism and religion, but there’s wolf fur poking out of the edges. As we rail from the pulpit against feminism in America, against the feminizing of our culture and our men, let us remember that a vote in her direction will do more to advance the cause of feminism in America than has ever been accomplished in one single Presidential election. And most feminists do not stand for life. As we train our daughters to be keepers at home, fulfilling God’s divine plan for their lives and His Church, are we with one stroke going to cast a vote for someone who has rejected the Biblical standard of wife and mother? — Link
The “Palin Dilemma” indeed! This is the woman many of my sister feminists, and my wanna-be progressive, leftist and liberal male allies were and are so afraid of. These are the sentiments of this vast dominionist army for which she was supposedly some sort of stealth “muse”!
I walked among these scary Christians for many years. During those years, I was a leader of women, and among those women were my closest friends, mentors, sisters. I know these people– what they believe, what they stand for, what makes them tick. And that’s one reason that from the very beginning, I viewed Sarah Palin’s candidacy not as a threat to the future of feminism, not as a threat to women or to this country, but as evidence of an amazingly positive change in the wind, an incredible shift, ultimately in favor of all women. Just as the patriarchs I’ve quoted above similarly recognized her candidacy as quite dangerous to them and to their determination that white male heterosupremacy continue.
Feminists, progressives, liberals, leftists, Democrats, roundly simply did not get it. For the most part they missed something very big, big time.
For me this was exquisitely, exquisitely painful. So many feminists’, and prominent feminists’, failure to study, investigate and to be able to cogently articulate and analyze what the issues really were for conservative Christians, women in particular, and for all women, was also painful. We are talking about a large group of women here, and believe it or not, and their lives and issues are not so very different from the lives and issues of all women as women in the U.S. It is tragic to me the degree to which feminists don’t get this.
I know I am a good writer and communicator, and yet I struggle to communicate the degree of disconnect I see between the stated goals and intentions of feminism for women and the behaviors of feminists as I witnessed them during the election campaign, including towards Sarah Palin. How do we make revolution if we do not attempt to understand women, all women, and their issues and struggles? How are we ever going to connect across the kind of over-the-top fear-mongering exemplified in Naomi Wolf’s essay excerpted above and the similar fear-mongering of so many others? How are we ever going to have credibility with women who might be our allies one day if some of us are so willing to lie about them and attack them, wth no apparent interest in learning what is accurate and true about them?
Like I say, this post is a small beginning in my own project of working towards repairing the disconnect I see. Given what I see around me all of the time, though, honestly, I am just not very hopeful.
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