The Unclothed Emperor: Sarah Palin and Catholic Voters

I’ll put my cards on the table right away: I think Sarah Palin would be a disaster as vice-president. In fact, I find it insulting in the extreme that a major political party would offer her to the American people as a possible vice-president—as if we have no brains, no moral acumen, no ability to sift fact from fiction even when the fiction is so outrageous that only a fool would mistake it for fact. If I were a woman, I’d be fighting mad at the insinuation that I might choose to vote for Sarah Palin because she’s a viable role model for women in the 21st century.

Political analysts are rightly focusing attention on Sarah Palin’s lack of any preparation at all for the office for which she’s being proposed. I share this concern. But my primary objection to Sarah Palin has to do with her religious worldview. It’s, in a word, dangerous—dangerously dangerous.

And here’s the galling thing about it: there’s nothing really new about Sarah Palin’s religious worldview. The kooky theocratic positions she defends, tricked out in carefully clipped scripture verses that ignore the entire gist, the basic moral thrust, of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, are not significantly different from those that the political right has dangled for some years now in front of “values voters.”

The insult Sarah Palin represents to American voters is that she’s being offered to us now: now, when anyone with eyes to see can see that the values shtick of the religious right has never been anything but a carrot dangled before the horse of right-wing Christian voters, with no intent for that carrot ever to reach the mouth of the horse. Who keeps predictably lunging for the carrot, wizened as may be, even when it will never have a taste of it . . . .

There are many ways to approach the question of all that is dangerous about Sarah Palin’s religious worldview—an all that comprises a grab-bag full of horrors ranging from the belief that women are made to be dominated by men, to the belief that God has a special place in God’s heart for the red, white, and blue, to the assumption that the war in Iraq is a holy war, to the conclusion that God intends to “save” the Jewish people before the final curtain of history slams down, and that anything the state of Israel does in the meantime is therefore automatically blessed by God. And then there’s the shooting wolves from airplanes thing, the cherished proposition that the natural world is given into “man’s” hands to exercise dominion over (read: exploit) it . . . .

Not to mention the whole family values bag of tricks, whose contents are rightly being pulled out for inspection by bloggers and reporters today, and examined with mingled amusement, consternation, and disbelief. Here’s a way to track the absurd claim the religious right continues to try to make on American voters’ loyalty today—even today: in less than two decades, the religious right has gone from wagging its finger at us about the immorality of out-of-wedlock pregnancy (remember Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown?), to chiding us now if we dare to wonder whether conceiving a child without benefit of marriage might be antithetical to sound family values.

We’re now being told—and told we’d better swallow the story, or else—that conceiving a child before marriage is a positive demonstration of pro-life values. It’s a choice that affirms the sanctity of marriage, the resolve of “Christians” to overcome abortion, the complementarity of servant women and master men. Tom Minnery, senior v-p of Focus on the Family Action, informed the American public after he and other right-wing politico-religious head honchos had twisted McCain’s arm to pick Palin, that she "she has not rejected the feminine side of who she is, so for that reason, she will be attractive to conservative voters" (www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/the-secretive-right-wing_b_122881.html).

Puhleez. I don’t care a flip whether Sarah Palin’s first-born son arrived eight months after she eloped with Track’s father. I think it’s as distasteful (and as enervating, given the real problems our society faces) to focus attention on the struggles Bristol Palin now faces as it was to focus attention on Bill Clinton’s White House sexcapades week after dreary week after dreary week several years ago.

But—and this is a but that can't simply be cast aside as irrelevant special pleading on the part of liberals—the Sarah Palins of the world have made these questions an issue. Sarah Palin opposes sex education in schools. Sarah Palin believes abstinence-only education works. Sarah Palin has held her foot in the door to keep pregnant teen mothers from receiving benefits they desperately need in order to raise the children that she and the churches allied with her tell these teens they must bear and raise, or else.

Sarah Palin has represented herself as a shining exemplar of family values. She is a courageous foot soldier of the Lord in the battle against demonic gays with their demonic clamor for marital rights equal to the ones she and her spouse enjoy. It beggars belief that her defenders would now seek to flip her own family’s record vis-à-vis family values upside down and try to convince us that this painfully marred record not only does not require embarrassed justification, but is actually exemplary—a wonderful demonstration to us of the lessons about the ideal family that the religious right has been trying so hard to get through our thick skulls lo these many years now.

And who’s buying this hogwash? Well, Catholics, for one thing—at least some Catholics, and if a recent online Zogby poll is any indicator of the drift of Catholic opinion after McCain’s announcement of Palin as his running mate, a goodly number of Catholics.

Today’s Clerical Whispers blog has a report that a Zogby poll done soon after the announcement found that 54 percent of Catholic respondents see McCain’s choice of Palin as positive—a percentage that mirrors the views of voters as a whole in the entire sample of 526 respondents (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/09/zogby-online-poll-shows-most-catholics.html). Fifty-four percent of American Catholics—if the Zogby poll is accurate—see Palin in a positive light. Fifty-four percent of my co-religionists not only do not see her eccentric, dangerous religio-political worldview as objectionable, but presumably find it consonant with Catholic teaching and Catholic values.

These findings don’t surprise me. But they do boggle my mind. They represent the strongest possible indictment of the American Catholic bishops, who have intentionally led Catholic voters into the cul-de-sac of Christian right politics—a cul-de-sac going nowhere, because it was designed to be a dead end. And it has not taken rocket science to see this. In continuing to permit—even to encourage—Catholic voters to believe it is their religious duty to vote for Sarah Palin and her ilk, the American Catholic bishops are shamefully abdicating their duty to be responsible teachers of their flock, not to mention competent pastors.

There is tremendous irony in what has happened to the American Catholic vote in the last two decades. And if we cannot see that irony, I think we might as well begin to pack our bags and abandon the public forum in which we claim we have something of importance to share about values.

Here’s the dark heart of the irony: Sarah Palin is what used to be called a lapsed Catholic. She was baptized Catholic, and as a young teen, chose to be re-baptized in the Assemblies of God church (see Cathleen Decker and Michael Finnegan, “Palin Has Risen Quickly from PTA to VP Pick,” Los Angeles Times, 30 August, www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-mccainveepbio30-2008aug30,0,2159346.story).* In choosing Sarah Palin over Joe Biden—apparently with the active complicity of many bishops—American Catholics are choosing a lapsed Catholic over a practicing one. The claim that Sarah Palin somehow represents Catholic values better than Joe Biden does requires as many mental contortions to make it acceptable as does the claim that conceiving a baby out of wedlock is an exemplary demonstration of family values.

What is wrong with this picture? Well, it’s what’s always wrong when fiction trumps fact, and when we’re asked to pretend that we don’t spot the fiction, that our eyes and brains are on cruise control—a damning irony so frequently evident in the behavior of morally vacuous leaders that Hans Christian Andersen invented a fairy tale about an emperor with no clothes to expose the irony.

As recently as last Saturday, the high muck-muck of the Knights of Columbus, Carl A. Anderson, was once again spouting gibberish about how Catholics have no choice except to vote McCain in this election, because Biden is “a man at odds with the highest levels of his own Catholic faith” (see http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com, linking to an op-ed piece by Anderson in the Sun Times [Chicago], www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/1136768,CST-EDT-open30.article). Yes, that Carl A. Anderson, the same Supreme Knight who recently announced to this year’s annual convention of the Knights of Columbus that,

We will never succeed in building a culture of life if we continue to vote for politicians who support a culture of death.

It is time that Catholics shine a bright line of separation between themselves and all those politicians who defend the abortion regime of Roe v. Wade.

Imagine if this year millions of Catholic voters simply say “no” – no to every candidate of every political party who supports abortion (www.kofc.org/un/eb/en/convention_2008/index.html).

If this is not a classic look-at-the-emperor’s-splendid-clothes argument, then I’ve never met one of those splendid-clothes arguments. News flash for Mr. Anderson: millions of Catholic voters have been simply saying no to candidates who support abortion, over and over—as in helping get Mr. Bush elected.

And if the current presidential regime even remotely resembles what “building a culture of life” rather than a culture of death is all about, then I believe I’ve just spent the last four years on Pluto rather than planet Earth. In what shape, form, or fashion does the response to Katrina represent the values of a culture of life? Or the war in Iraq? Or the failure to provide even basic healthcare for millions of citizens, including millions of children and teen mothers struggling to raise children?

The disparity is too easy to see. The glaring reality—the gap between fact and fiction—is simply too obvious. Something else must be going on in the bishops’ willingness to let themselves be played for fools again and again by the religious right, when no promises about life values are ever cashed in, and yet Catholic voters are asked one more time to believe that their votes will contribute to a culture of life, if they’ll only vote right.

There must be some other reason for the bishops to permit people like Carl Anderson to claim the protection of the episcopal mantle, as they fulminate about what those at the “highest levels of the Catholic faith” think about matters political. Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that the American Catholic bishops, on the whole, actually believe in and support the “values” of the current administration, in all their bankrupt ugliness, more than they do the values of those who propose viable ethical-political alternatives to the status quo.

It’s about power. It’s all about power. It’s about image management. It’s about money, its ebb and flow. It’s about compromises and back-room deals. It’s about you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

It’s, as Sarah Palin reminds us, about men ruling the world and women submitting to their God-given role as servant leaders. It’s about abandonment of pastoral responsibility—an abandonment so painfully evident in what we now know about the abuse crisis and how a majority of bishops have handled it that I really do not know how these distinguished gentlemen of the cloth keep holding up their heads, let alone stand in the pulpit and preach to us.

And this is an abandonment of pastoral responsibility that runs through the leading ranks of all American Christian churches. Were it otherwise, McCain would never have even considered insulting our intelligence and moral sensibility so profoundly by offering Sarah Palin to us as an exemplar of Christian values.

*Interestingly enough, though John Allen’s analysis of Palin as a post-denominational Christian notes the irony of her appeal to Catholic voters, Allen does not even mention her childhood Catholicism: see http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1739.