Camille Paglia, on Salon.com, wrote an interesting opinion column regarding Sarah Palin. I’ve been doing my best to avoid the silly season of an election year, but this column had too much good stuff to ignore just because it included Sarah Palin (which was actually a detraction, because I really don’t want to talk politics).
Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.
This goes for environmentalism, “poverty”, and health care programs as well. There seems to be a significant agreement that there is something seriously wrong in this country in regards to these issues, just no agreement of methodology to fix them. In other words, just because I don’t agree with a person’s proposed solution to an issue, does not mean that I don’t think that there is one.
Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today’s pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.
Yeah, well, a lot of men (including myself, probably) would fit into that description as well. Ouch.
Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington occupy their own mental zones — nice to visit but not a place to stay if you value independent thought these days.
Ouch!
A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn’t worth a warm bucket of spit.
I give Ms. Paglia kudos. At least in regards to feminism, she is consistent.
But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, “Sexual Personae,”) has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.
On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?
I’m torn by her reaction. Her opinion is, “it’s all about me,” whether it’s choosing not to be “inconvenienced” by a baby, or “inconvenienced” by a murderer. On the other hand, it has a form of consistency, forthrightness, and forethought, which makes it easier to discuss.
If Sarah Palin tries to intrude her conservative Christian values into secular government, then she must be opposed and stopped. But she has every right to express her views and to argue for society’s acceptance of the high principle of the sanctity of human life.
Here, of course, I do have a problem. At what point does it cross the line? especially when she says:
…Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion.
If that is the case (which I believe it is for many on the left, but also “Republican” ideology on the right), than they, according to her logic, should be stopped as well. Then, you are left with politicians sticking their wet fingers in the wind. Leadership of any sort cannot exist in such an environment.
