Palin the Theocrat and Non-Woman

Michael Gerson in this morning’s Washington Post takes on the Faith-Based Condescension in the intellectual and media elites’ criticism of Gov. Sarah Palin. “Palin is portrayed as a ‘theocrat’—a Muslim fundamentalist in lipstick. She has ‘a right to her religious beliefs’ in precisely the same sense that one has a right to believe the moon is made of Muenster, but she must not be allowed to ‘impose’ such beliefs on others.”

Gerson notes that there are serious responses to such silliness, but suggests that the political fallout “must have Team McCain shouting and hollering with the joy of a frontier camp meeting.” And then, the zinger:

In general, liberal political and media elites demonstrate a religious diversity that runs the spectrum from secularism to liberal Episcopalianism—all the varied shades from violet to blue. Yet they assume their high church or Mencken-like disdain for religious enthusiasm is broadly shared. It was the sociologist Peter Berger who observed, “Puerto Ricans, Jews, and Episcopalians each form around 2 percent of the American population. Guess which group does not think of itself as a minority.”

If you think for a moment that Gerson himself is exaggerating or engaging in a bit of journalistic hyperbole, look no further than the comments by one Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. Writing for the Washington Post ‘s “On Faith” blog , she writes:

[Palin’s] 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.

According to Prof. Doniger, Palin is not only a crypto-theocrat, she is a non-woman.