Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Sarah Palin: The Regressive Choice

I have tried very hard these past few months to avoid getting involved or keeping tabs on the political milieu of this nation during this election season but the nomination of Sarah Palin galvanised me into caring again. John McCain and the Republican party had numerous candidates to select from, all of whom were qualified in some level to at least share the podium with him as a potential running mate. Sarah Palin was not nor is not one of them. Palin as a candidate does not bring anything to the table aside from being a small town mayor, 1/2 term as governor for a state that is enormous land mass size but minuscule in human presence size and she is a hockey mother. In fact Orange County, California, my home county has more people to be more specific it has nearly 5 times as many people in that county than in all of Alaska. As of 2006 Alaska had approximately 670,053 inhabitants while Orange County had 3,002,048 inhabitants.

Furthermore, she believes in creationism and that the Coming of the Rapture is nearly imminent. She also believes that women do not have the right to an abortion even in cases of rape, in fact while she was Mayor of Wasilia, she made rape victims pay for their own rape kits. What happened to the compassion that Jesus preaches, is that just for rhetoric? If Jesus Christ is soon coming down for Final Judgement doesn't it matter that she as a leader showed no compassion for her actual fellow living, breathing and conscious human being? These women who were raped were victims and they didn't need to be treated as pariahs, that sort of thinking existed in the middle ages and as recent as a few decades ago but doesn't belong in the 21st century. Palin's rational is this, yes rape is wrong but so is abortion because abortion is murder so lets not commit two wrongs to make it right.

Fundamentally, this comes from her entirely uneducated understanding of life and conception with its various stages of development. The idea of person hood has only been an issue of law in the past 150 years or so, it was in the 19th century that both the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church conferred full person hood upon conception. The ancient Greeks viewed person hood becoming reality 40 days after conception for males and 90 for females. While the early Catholic Church varied in its position about when the soul actually enters the fetus, the modern church holds it occurs upon conception but various early Churches held different views, St. Augustine believed that the soul can only be unified with the body when the body is formed, meaning the lump of cells in the early stages isn't a person yet. The 13th Century church held that the soul is in the body only upon the quickening or the movement of the fetus in the womb, therefore abortion before that was not a sin nor murder. For the next few hundred years until the modern age, the stage at which person hood was attached varied until 19th century when the modern Church held the view conception is the stage of person hood.

Modern Science doesn't fully deal with when "person hood" attaches but we do have an objective standard to judge by now, that is when does consciousness and ability to feel pain set in. By week 9 the fetus has develop the medulla, pons and mid brain which means at this stage the fetus will spontaneously kick or move then within a week of that will take its first breath in the womb. It is also at this stage that the limbs are finally forming. From that time on, the brain grows at a phenomenal rate and the fetus six weeks prior to birth has shown signs of actual cognition through auditory and other means of outside the womb. It is almost a medical/biological impossibility for a fetus to feel pain prior to 29 or 30 weeks. Palin and those like her don't base their belief on anything concrete or objective but just on religious or moral authority.

Now, I can keep going on but I'm going end by talking about her lack of qualifications to be a national leader. First and foremost, Palin is not an educated person, she attended 5 different colleges in 6 years. That is the extent of her education. She doesn't understand how the economy works nor any background in foreign policy or international relations nor does she understand science. She runs on two main things 1. her gender and 2. emotional/moral support that people look for. She uses her gender to her advantage, she is the woman reformer who worked tirelessly to break into the old boy's club. She is anything but the woman reformer, she wishes to take women back to being baby receptacles and the silent bearers of tradition. She uses her "reform" platform to appeal to those out there who are seeking emotional and moral solidarity, instead of presenting logical and reasonable ideas she preys on the emotions and fears of people, a very typical GOP and Bush administration tactic. She stands for the idea that we don't need to expect much out of our leaders only that they are "average" and can relate to us, not that they need actual ideas, inspiration, education and qualifications to run this land of ours. Let me leave you with this, if you were going into surgery you'd want a qualified and knowledgeable surgeon operating on you not the hot dog vendor, or the lawyer or the sales person at the Gap or especially this Governor of Alaska. How could you possibly want her to make decisions that have repercussions over generations and control the lives of millions of people and affect billions. If she is elected...maybe the rapture is coming, cause only God could save us from our own stupidity at that point.