Sunday, June 5, 2011

More on Sarah Palin's Family Values

The Palin Family: from Wasilla to Washington

The article on Sarah Palin that I linked to via the American Thinker in my previous blog post is a slightly edited version of the one I originally sent. I wasn't as sympathetic towards Sarah Palin a the editors made me out to be.

The American Thinker's editors tried to make my article as Palin-sympathetic as possible, focusing on the admittedly harsh liberals. I didn't intend for the article to suggest "bad liberals vs. good-but-misguided conservatives." In fact, I wrote that female conservative commentators were taking Palin's side purely for feminist reasons, rather than conservative ones, and were unable to assess some of the legitimate criticisms made on Palin by non-conservatives.

Also, my original title was "Sarah Palin's Lost Opportunity" and although the title the American Thinker gave the article is a reasonable "Sarah Palin: whose family values?", it doesn't address my point, which is that Palin had a chance to enter conservative American politics as one of the few female Vice Presidents, and perhaps the first female President, but her chaotic family life and liberal beliefs (as a conservative candidate) became detrimental to that objective.

To be fair to Thomas Lifson, who is the editor, and with whom I was corresponding, I think he was also trying to appease the reactions from his readers. But, even this abridged version didn't help, since I got 106 responses, the majority of which were unsympathetic towards my piece (to put it mildly), although a few saw my point. One commentator wrote:
It hurts when someone is honest about the hypocritical nature of conservatives on family values, doesn't it? Well done.
But perhaps my approach was not nearly as radically conservative as the American Thinker commentators opine, since I was still willing to give a female candidate a chance to hold the highest position in the country.

I posted the unrevised article at Camera Lucida.