Crossposted from another blog

Credit to Emma VC

sarah palin.
04Sep08

She fails to separate her religion from her leadership. And, as we learned last night, she has the terrifying talent of speaking in a way that commands attention while distracting listeners from the content of her words. She could read from a phonebook and command attention.

This country is supposed to be about the separation of church and state. Our beginnings are based in choice and freedom, the idea that we’re free to do as we will, to make our own way, worship as we like (and if we like). But this woman stands on a platform defined by religion, and her own religion at that, a platform that restricts personal freedom rather than protect it. It’s defined by the highly subjective and easily abused notion of ‘morality,’ where things are right and wrong and good and evil and anyone who raises questions is unpatriotic. This is the sort of rhetoric that girds fascists. Look at history. Look at recent history.

Americans are notorious amnesiacs.

A good friend of mine used to be an admissions officer at Princeton. She once said that she started getting applications with the acronym WWJD in the essay sections, one after another. Whole chunks of the application were supposed to be devoted to unpacking complex issues and she was getting a lot of white space - a sea of white space - broken by this single acronym. Thinking it was some kind of objection to the nature of the question, she gathered the applications up and took the stack to the dean to ask him what this acronym meant.

“What would Jesus do,” he said. “That’s their answer to the question.”

“But the whole point of the question is to display your ability to think critically,” she said.

The dean shrugged.

That story really struck me because it wasn’t about belief systems or spirituality or religion. It was about mindless obedience, so much so that when called to address a complicated issue, the response was an acronym, like a secret handshake. No thinking involved. Just a passive nod of the head.

Palin scares the crap out of me because her platform requires no real thinking either, and plenty of blind obedience. Gays are deviant. Books are dangerous. Abortion is murder. Evolution is wrong. War is right. And all it takes to win with a platform like that is charisma.