One Thing About Palin-- Unlike McCain-- At Least She's Consistent When It Comes To Choice

She's against it. Well, McCain's against choice too-- and his anti-choice voting record is 100%-- but the Buy Bull thumpers don't trust him. They do trust Palin. And they should; her anti-choice pronouncements are unwavering and extremist.

In November 2006, then gubernatorial candidate Sarah Palin declared that she would not support an abortion for her own daughter even if she had been raped.

In Alaska that says a lot. Alaska, where the wimmin are relatively scarce, has one of the highest rape/sexual assault rates in the country, over double what it is in the Lower 48, and "25 percent of all rapes resulted in unwanted pregnancies."

Last week I was talking about this with an anti-choice friend who is otherwise very liberal. She used to be pro-choice but after having a child wound up getting sucked into the whole religionist thing and now cannot distinguish between a fetus-- even one that is one minute old-- and a healthy bouncing two-year old. To her, they are both "babies." She and I both oppose murdering children and we both think killing a baby is a capital offense-- although I think she's anti-death penalty in general (while I'm all for it, at least in theory); we just define "babies" differently. My friend, unlike Sarah Palin and the Republican Party, thinks if a 15 year old girl is raped by her grandfather she should be able to have an abortion. I asked her why. I mean, it isn't the "baby's" fault; why should the "baby" be murdered because the grandfather got boozed up and raped the girl?

Debbie Wassermann Schmaltz' pet Republican in south Florida, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, goes even further. If gramps knocks up the 15 year old and the doctor says the 15 year old is likely to die in childbirth, Ros-Lehtinen's position is that God will deal appropriately with her soul. Yet, this is hardly a view supported by anyone who isn't a delusional religious fanatic. Even in South Dakota, voters rejected legislation that would have outlawed abortions for victims of rape and incest. Palin may look like a nice, normal young woman. But she's as much an extremist as die-hard kooks like James Inhofe, Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn... and more extreme than McCain himself.

But it's not just abortion policy that has Democrats up in arms over Palin. In that same 2006 questionnaire, the soon-to-be governor said she would fund abstinence-only education programs in schools. "The explicit sex-ed programs," she added, "will not find my support." The stance, which reflected the priorities of the GOP, nevertheless led to an incredulous editorial in the Juneau Empire.

"Abstinence may be a laudable goal, but failing to educate teenagers about how to protect themselves from disease or unintended pregnancy is tragically misguided. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, abstinence-only programs do not reduce sexual activity, teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease. Every day 10,000 U.S. teens contract a sexually transmitted disease, 2,400 get pregnant and 55 contract HIV. Unintended pregnancies happen to Republicans, Democrats and people of all faiths."

Palin's 17 year old unmarried daughter, Bristol, is 5 months pregnant now and will, of course, have the baby. If that's her choice, I certainly respect it. I wonder, though, if Bristol hadn't just had abstinence-only education if she might not have had to go through all the anguish she must be going through now. And that's the last I'll have to say about that; basically, I agree with Barack Obama when it comes to this kind of thing: "Let me be a clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people's families are off limits, and people's children are especially off limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and, you know, teenage children, that shouldn't be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that's off limits."

Meanwhile, Kath25, did an incredible job on DailyKos the other day explaining why exactly McCain-Palin is an abysmal choice for American women. I recommend it heartily. As my friend Debra pointed out today, "Woman still make 77 cents to every dollar a man makes for doing equal work. I think it's actually declined under George Bush. Despite almost 40 years of the women's movement women still get paid less than men for doing equal work... that was exactly the point of the Lily Ledbetter lawsuit. The governor's salary in Alaska is about $82,000. If Sarah Palin was paid like other women, she would have been paid only about $63,000. She, though, is protected by law and statute. She wants to deny other woman that protection and that right."

Obama's problem with Palin is that she's just the same as McCain and Bush on women's right's to equal pay for equal work. "We're going to make sure that equal pay for equal work is a reality in this country," Obama said at an economic forum in Toledo, Ohio, a battleground state this fall. Alluding to Palin without saying her name, he told about 200 people sitting on a sun-drenched office rooftop that she "seems like a very engaging person, nice person. But I've got to say, she's opposed, like John McCain is, to equal pay for equal work. That doesn't make much sense to me."

Samantha B. thinks that any gal who doesn't want her lady brain overloaded, has found her candidate: