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Did Somebody Say Sarah Palin?

by Brian Caulfield 

Whatever you think about Sarah Palin, one thing is for sure: if you have a TV show, she is guaranteed to send your ratings soaring (hello, Oprah), and if you have a Web-based column, slipping in her name will drive hits to your site (hello, reader). But that is not the reason I am writing about Sarah Palin and mentioning her name in every sentence.

I actually read her book, Going Rogue, and have a few things to say about it that have not already been said. Honest.

I should warn you, however, that since most readers will judge my sanity, my intelligence and my lineage back to 10th century Ireland solely on whether I liked the book or not, I am not going to say whether I liked to book or not, or even whether or not I like Sarah Palin. I am going to rise above the fray and the politics of personal destruction to talk about Going Rogue from the perspective that is proper to this column: family and “the spiritual truths found in daily life,” as my Headline Bistro bio states that this column is about.

To start with, I think it fair to say that Sarah Palin and her family have good values that they don’t always live up to, as seen in the case of their daughter, Bristol, who delivered a baby at age 18. Failing to do as you say may be hypocritical, as some critics insist, but it may also have something to do, in this case, with the difficulty of raising children in a sex-saturated, media-dominated culture, and even more basically, with something called Original Sin (this sentence satisfies the “spiritual truths found in daily life” mandate of my column).

In this, the Palins are like most American families. We, too, teach and expect abstinence from our teens, and a significant number of us are dismayed to find our teenagers involved in hook-ups or pregnancies. The difference is that few of us are placed on a national stage when this happens.

The book contains a host of other issues of interest to Catholics that have not been noted widely, including:

1. Palin starts the book by revealing a significant pro-life fact: her adorable 8-year-old daughter, Piper, was the model for the Alaska Right to Life poster of a baby in pink with plastic angel wings fastened to her shoulders. Palin tells this story because she saw the poster at the Alaska State Fair in late August 2008, where she was carrying her Down syndrome newborn, Trig, while walking amid the “Halibut tacos and reindeer sausage.” It was also then when she received a cell phone call from John McCain asking her to be his running mate.

2. Although her mother was raised Catholic, at some point she “became interested in an expanded faith. She sought further spiritual fulfillment in addition to the liturgical traditions of the Catholic Church.” Palin and her siblings followed, attending Sunday school at the Wasilla Assembly of God church, “the most ‘alive’” congregation in the area.

3. From beginning to end, Palin writes about her relationship with God, even encouraging readers to do as she did and hand their lives over to Jesus. She is clearly a true believer, and describes numerous times when she and her husband, Todd, clasped hands to pray, especially when they learned that their fifth child, conceived when she was serving as governor, would have an extra chromosome.

4. Much has been made, by friendly and hostile reviewers alike, about Palin writing “in the voice of God” to her children about Trig’s condition. When I read the passage, my first thought was that the critics don’t know much about Christianity of the past 40 years. Rather than being uniquely self-absorbed or pathologically pretentious, her God talk is more likely an expression of the spirituality of “On Eagle’s Wings” and “Here I Am Lord,” hugely popular tunes in which the congregation takes on God’s voice in proclaiming, “I will raise you up on eagle’s wings” and “I the Lord of wind and rain.” Palin may be simply a product of this spiritual trend.

5. She says that the thought of abortion flashed across her mind when she received the Down syndrome diagnosis, and she has sympathy for women who feel they have no other option. She also says that although she prefers abstinence education to explicit sex ed, she does support contraceptive options.

Overall, the book does a good job of fulfilling its subtitle, “An American Life.” Sarah Palin is unapologetically pro-American, and her life has cut across a section of our nation’s political history and attracted fervent loyalty and enthusiasm from a large sector of the populace. Readers without a pronounced animus toward the author will find, perhaps despite themselves, a lively and upbeat story of how a mother of five, from a state that is usually boxed off on the map, got involved in small-town politics and rose to mayor, governor and vice presidential candidate and is now one of the nation’s most loved or despised figures.

If not exactly a classic rags to riches story, it is at least a “diapers to destiny” one. It is unfortunate that because of Palin’s pro-life stance, a certain strain of feminism doesn’t have room for her, even though she stresses that hard work, maternal instincts and household common sense served her well in politics. As she says, she will not “sit down and shut up.”

Finally, it is understandable that those who saw Palin’s poor performance in interviews with Katie Couric and the spoofs by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live might think that she is unfit for national politics, let alone the presidency. Those images die hard and will rightly haunt her if she ever seeks national office again.

This book is written to address those and other touchy issues and to set her words, actions and decisions in a context that smoothes the negative edges. Given the fact that she is set to be a force on the national stage for some time to come, either as an advocate or a candidate, Sarah Palin has performed a service in putting her young, high-energy life to paper. Americans will be able to judge her by her own words.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)