"I Cannot Wait for the VP Debate" Round II

This article so clearly expresses my feelings regarding McCain's VP choice, that I wanted to post it on my own blog because I feel as if I couldn't say it better myself:

"All Beliefs Welcome, Unless They are Forced on Others"

By: Wendy Doniger
Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago's Divinity School

"Belief in god, like getting pregnant, is a private matter between consenting adults (or one consenting adult and one or more deities) and is no one else's business. I am on record in this blog (and have not budged an inch) as not objecting to any candidate's religious views.

But I object strongly when anyone (and especially anyone with political power) tries to take their theology out in public, to inflict those private religious (or sexual) views on other people. In both sex and religion (which combine in the debates about abortion), Sarah Palin's views make me fear that the Republican party has finally lost its mind.

As for sex, the hypocrisy of her outing her pregnant daughter in front of millions of people, hard on the heels of her concealing her own pregnancy (her faith in abstinence applying, apparently, only to non-Palins), is nicely balanced by her hypocrisy in gushing with loving support of her teenage daughter after using a line-item veto to cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers in Alaska.

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.

And as for religion, I'd love to know precisely how the Good Lord conveyed to her so clearly his intention to destroy the environment (global warming, she thinks, is not the work of human hands, so it must be the work of You Know Who), the lives of untold thousands of soldiers and innocent bystanders (He is apparently rooting for this, too, she says), and, incidentally, a lot of polar bears and wolves, not to mention all the people who will be shot with the guns that she thinks other people ought to have. An even wider and more sinister will to impose her religious views on other people surfaced in her determination to legislate against abortion even in cases of rape and in her attempts to ban books, including books on evolution, and to fire the librarian who stood against her.

In dramatic contrast, Barack Obama was right to remark (of the teenage pregnancy) that you should back off from peoples' families, a remark directed ostensibly to press coverage but one that could also, I think, be thrown back at Palin herself: don't humiliate members of your family in order to get elected to public office. And he was right to remark (of the religious implications of abortion), 'I don't presume to be able to answer these kinds of theological questions.' Of course, it would be hard for Palin to follow this excellent policy, since it's evident that almost her only qualification in the minds of McCain & co.is her family. Moreover, it's hard to square Palin's attitudes to both family privacy and abortion with the shifting policies of McCain himself, who, in 2000, said that any question of his own daughter's pregnancy and/or abortion 'would be a private decision that we would share within our family and not with anyone else,' and who, though describing himself as a 'pro-life' candidate, said he would not ban abortion in the case of rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother, nor would he reverse Roe v. Wade.

Joe Biden's views are most relevant to the question at hand, since, as a Catholic, he shares much of Palin's embryological theology: he believes life begins at conception. But he has gone out of his way to insist that he would not impose his personal views on others, and has indeed voted against curtailing abortion rights and against criminalizing abortion. That is the right answer. It's in the Constitution. It's not in the Bible, or the Qu'ran, or the Bhagavad Gita. It's in the mother-lovin' Constitution."

By: Wendy Doniger
Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago's Divinity School