At the base of Sarah Palin’s politics is a religious framework that rejects intellectualism. The pride of people who are more interested in, say… sports!, than in reading the international news section must have a way to systematically reject intellect to survive in the political world. Obama has no accomplishments to a person like this. After all, those of us who admire Obama do so because of how intelligent and thoughtful he is, how accomplished he is academically, and because of the important counsels he has sought since becoming senator.
Sarah Palin’s life is easier than that. She has spent a little time learning all the strictest rules of her religion–rules which demonize half her fellow human beings–and, like George Bush, she doesn’t have to know a heck of a lot more than that. Her gut will inform her about the rest.
Take her opposition to sex ed and the fact that she recently line-item-vetoed funding for a program to house Alaskan homeless, pregnant teenagers. Any decent person would find herself in a moral crisis right now, as her daughter could have contracted AIDS and died thanks to her abstinence-only teaching policy. But, like a good point guard, Sarah Palin is direct, confident, dominant, never reflective. The rules her religion offers keep her free of such complications.
You see, it is not an intellectual problem she has with sex ed. It is an issue of purity. The earliest expression of religion is its purity function. People who sin can be impure. Acts can be impure. Competing religions can be impure. Your hand can be impure. Your food can be impure. And to Sarah Palin’s set, things you say can be impure. Things like “penis,” “vagina,” and “erection.” To “pollute” the minds of young innocents can make them impure, and it can cause them to do impure things–”dirty” things–that cause them to be impure.
Fundamentalist Christians have strange “Purity Balls,” where the father and the daughter go out on a “date” and they dance and dine, and the father presents the daughter with a diamond ring that she will wear until she gets married and is properly initiated into a sexual life. This practice involves a father in his teenaged daughter’s sexual life in a charade that can best be described as romantic mimicry, and, as such, it only makes sense in a world ruled by something other than reason or intellect.
This anti-intellectualism is joyous to those practicing it, but often vulgar to the rest of us. Some other examples: chanting “drill-baby-drill” during the Palin speech; the Republican Right’s denials of global warming; Sarah Palin’s soon-to-be son-in-law’s website’s description of himself as a “f**king redneck;” Bush-Cheney’s prideful abandonment of diplomacy; Giuliani’s mockery of Obama’s nuanced reply to Rick Warren’s question as to when life begins; Palin’s idiotic claim that the Iraq Invasion is “…a task that is from God;” or her and Giuliani’s racist ridicule of Obama as community organizer…. surely, the entire last 8 years are full of examples.
Religion is the catalyst that frees these people to do things they should not. These are the very people who cling to religion to keep themselves from doing “sins,” “evil” things–things, mind you, I, as an atheist, never even have a desire to do. That “We are all sinners,” they used to drone at me in Sunday school is bogus. Don’t believe it. In my life, it has been my observation that the conception of sin creates sinners.
Mark Crane
http://www.motormanmark.com/?p=103
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