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Sarah Palin’s agenda, to rule over as she deems most right, rather than a throwing of the doors wide open for all, and to truly respect their decisions, regardless whether they are in accord with her own preferences, is further evidenced by her abstinence-only stance on sex education and her unequivocal posture opposing an individual woman’s right to full information and the right to informatively decide amongst a range of options, how she will respond to a pregnancy.
One can believe what he or she wishes. One can believe that the Earth is flat, or that a frozen fertilized egg in a Petri dish is human. But believing does not make it so. What one cannot do, in the case of the latter, is to premise the contention on Christian faith as expressed in the Bible. As to when human life commences, Genesis 2:7 is clear: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
Bristol Palin is Sarah and Todd Palin’s 17-year old daughter. Bristol is pregnant. Sarah told the Republican Convention and the world that Bristol had decided to bear the child, to keep it, and that she and the father were going to marry. By the inherent rights subsumed in the definition of “decide,” Bristol was fully informed of the array of options — including abortion — that were available to her, and that she would not feel under any duress to make a decision that was not hers alone. In other words, if Bristol had decided to abort the fetus, she had to be able to genuinely feel that both her parents would fully respect that decision. For in the absence of having that option freely available, and the certain knowledge that she would not suffer diminishment of parental love and esteem as a consequence regardless which choice she made, she really, in effect, had no choice, and the decision was not really made by her at all.
Indeed, the notion of a truly free election to a course was enshrined in the military officer’s oath: “I (Name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation [emphasis mine] or purpose of evasion . . .” And every contract in the U.S. is voidable if any of the signatories to the contract can demonstrate he or she did not enter into it without duress or without full knowledge what he or she was doing.
Unless those conditions were there for Bristol, any proclamation by Sarah Palin that “Bristol has decided” was both disingenuous and cynical. What transpired in the Palin family was private, and should have remained so. But the matter fell rightfully into the public arena once Ms. Palin made the very public announcement concerning the expected birth and alleging what her daughter’s decision was. It became a public issue because it came on the heels of highly relevant information about her other public policy orientations; a heavy-handed intolerance for positions that did not reconcile fully with hers, positions that, by the way, concerned rights fully guaranteed by the Constitution; a document she aspires to swear to defend, but which she has worked to ignore.
Not quite parenthetically, I do not for the first part of a second believe that Bristol’s decision was 100% freely hers. I posit this because Sarah Palin has made her position clear and public: not even in the case of rape or incest, whether the victim was fully a woman or an adolescent, would she avail the victim any relief, even if such relief was sought, from the terrible emotional and psychological and physical trauma of carrying to full term the life lasting evidence of the cruel violence that was visited upon her. Candidly, and also rather parenthetically, I cannot imagine a person with a heart so completely cold to the travails of another human being, but most especially one woman to another. The ice that must be flowing through her veins, and the thought that at some future date she might as casually and callously send men and women to war against other men, women, and children, scares me in a way I cannot describe.
Sarah Palin is a citizen of the United States of America, but she is no American. Nor is anyone who would with their vote usher her into the second highest office in the land.
— Ed Tubbs
Reno, NV
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