The Visceral Hatred for Sarah Palin

Mark Shea does a nice job showing the left’s visceral hatred and fear of everything Sarah Palin stands for. It’s not what she thinks, but who she is. I noted this the other night at a barbecue with a friend from college and some of the folks she’d met in her year in New York. When the conversation turned to politics, Sarah Palin was touted as a “pro-life Nazi,” a hater of gay people, and a woman who took her eight-year-old daughter caribou hunting and then had the audacity to take a picture with her next to their kill.

But wait a minute, I thought, we’re sitting here eating lamb-and-turkey-burgers. Surely there’s nothing wrong with going hunting, and one less caribou isn’t going to do any harm. And shouldn’t the fact that it’s a mother and a daughter hunting make it all the better? Would the two young women before me rather have her staying home teaching docility and baking?

The strength of the hate I saw made an impression on me. Because it seems that many like the women I spoke with ultimately want two kinds of women in the world: women who are strong on their terms or women who are weak, but can be made strong on their terms.

But Sarah Palin is neither. Many American women are neither as well. Their world does not fit conveniently into the conventional feminist narrative. Betsy Fox-Genovese didn’t write ” Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life ” for nothing. What are these inexplicable women supposed to do?

My hope is that they make themselves heard, that the America—men and women—who can relate more to Sarah Palin than Maureen Dowd will show that they are not to be dismissed as a bunch of backward hicks and pro-life Nazis. And that afterward they offer their opponents a friendly invitation to go caribou hunting.