Pendragons Princess

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080903/pl_politico/13101

Sarah Palin’s private life has captured the nation’s attention with regard to her youngest child Trig. Several sources have disputed the rumor that Trig was really the baby of Sarah’s teenage daughter Bristol. Just recently it has been disclosed that Bristol is indeed pregnant, at the age of 17, and unmarried. So what is the problem here? Sarah Palin is a highly conservative Republican who touts traditional family values as part of her political agenda. As part of these traditional family values comes the forbidding of pre-marital sex, anti-abortion rhetoric, and of course, anti-contraceptive rhetoric. It is the latter part that scares me the most, if McCain gets elected this November, even more so than Palin’s belief in abstinence-only sex education, which has been proven to not work in public schools. Obviously it did not work with Bristol Palin, even though her mother claims that she will marry the father, Levi Johnston, a homeschooled student in Wasilla, Alaska.

Sarah Palin is a very attractive woman who is the governor of Alaska. Most of her views flaunt the secular liberal values in America. It is for this reason that the phrase “culture wars” has been used to describe McCain’s campaign. Does he plan on using her to impose the right-wing extremist values upon the nation? It would appear that way from the liberal and even moderate standpoint. Even though I consider myself a conservative, I lean towards the old conservatives, not this new group of conservatives popularly known as neocons. Sarah Palin and her family attend a number of churches, the Wasilla Bible Church, Church on the Rock, and the Juneau Christian Center located in Juneau, Alaska’s capital. Granted, all of these churches are of a fundamentalist nature, which is the obvious appeal to Palin and her family. Alaska in this sense is not too different from Arizona: it is largely conservative, Republican, and Christian. Most of the people I know here in Tucson are either Baptist, Evangelical, or Roman Catholic, and this is outside the UA community. While I have no problem with religion, I do not believe government is there to endorse a religion; that is why we have the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” This goes for religious morals, too, which have no business being in government. There are many Americans, myself included, who believe that the extreme right-wing want to to establish their brand of Christianity upon the nation, something which would ultimately restrict many freedoms we now possess. In order for that to happen, however, this fringe group would have to either dispose of, or at least rephrase the First Amendment. As a religious minority and a female, I still have issues with McCain’s VP pick even though he has been known to flounder between liberal and conservative ideologies. Palin is someone who would simply alienate female voters from McCain, even though he is not my candidate for the job.

I doubt Palin will last during the next month, what with her daughter’s pregnancy, plus Trig’s special needs as a Down’s Syndrome baby. Maybe McCain had an Alzheimer’s moment when he chose Palin as his VP. He would have been better off with anyone but her.