Sarah Palin describes herself as a pro-life feminist and she certainly is not your average soccer mom. Her career choices have put her smack dab up against the so-called glass ceiling and she's shattered a few at the local level. One would expect the feminist movement to extoll a self-made woman who has combined career and family and seems to do well at both, Bristol's pregnancy notwithstanding. (How many feminists have denied their own children the "right to choose" by dragging daughters down to the abortion mill to keep their embarrassment secret?)
The credentialed feminists with Ivy League degrees detest this upstart beauty queen, who to them is nothing more than the Alaskan version of trailer park trash. You can almost hear their teeth grinding as they fulminate about her being a brainless bimbo despite the fact that she can outtalk (and outhunt) all of them on energy policy and managed to beat the local political machine bosses at their own game. But Palin must be destroyed by the feminists because she is a pro-lifer who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. She pricks their guilt-ridden consciences til they heat the media furnace to white-hot, bind her hand and foot with their outlandish caricatures, and throw her in to be burnt to ash.
Which brings me to Ruth Marcus' recent column in the Washington Post about Palin. Marcus herself is a Yale undergrad with a legal degree from Harvard, the creme de la creme in elite circles. Her feminism is so deep and intolerant that she recently criticized Michelle Obama for describing herself as "mom-in-chief." As a mother of two daughters like Obama, Marcus can sympathize, but did Michelle "have to say it out loud, quite so explicitly? Is it really good for the team -- the team here being working women -- to have the 'mommy' stamp so firmly imprinted on her identity?"
Marcus' words link her to the early screeching, bra-burning feminists who described motherhood as slavery and demeaned women who chose it over careers. But why does she hate Palin so much whom she attacked relentlessly during the presidential campaign? Palin chose career, balancing it with family. Ah, but she breaks the biggest rule of radical feminism. She doesn't promote or shill for abortion. And so her words must be twisted to make it appear that she is, indeed, "pro-choice," but a hypocrite who wishes to deny the same choice to others.
In "Palin's Personal Choice" Marcus says Palin "made her eloquent case for choice at a right-to-life fundraising dinner." How did Palin suddenly switch from pro-lifer to pro-choicer on Marcus' balance sheet? She expressed her fears and her doubts and, yes, the temptation to abort. As a Catholic and a sinner I know just what Sarah Palin was talking about. I too have been tempted to do evil out of self-interest, and an immoral law (as it did with slavery) makes evil choices easier to justify. Welcome to the human condition!
Apparently, a majority choosing something evil is proof, in Marcus' morality, that it's a good and morally upright decision. In a society where health care rationing is increasingly likely, this is chilling. Will parents who refuse to abort Down's Syndrome children be cut off from health care assistance in the future? Would Ruth Marcus defend the right of parents to choose life for their sick children? Frankly, I doubt it. I can hear the same tone criticizing Michelle Obama for her statements on motherhood condemning women who inflict the world with their imperfect spawn.
Ruth Marcus reveals the cruel and cold-hearted face of feminism that treats abortion as a holy sacrament. In order to advocate women murdering their own children, feminists must kill womanly nature and the instinct to protect one's own young. They imitate Lady MacBeth who called on the spirits, to "unsex me here, And fill me, from the crown to the toe, topfull of direst cruelty...That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose." In the process, the feminist true believers mislead less ideologically-driven women who lack their deadly ambition but are taken in by their rhetoric.
But Ruth Marcus and others of her ilk lack the honesty of Lady Macbeth who very deliberately chose evil. Instead, they hide behind honeyed euphemisms about rights and choice and liberation. And they attack pro-lifers for "waving the bloody fetus" even as they lambast Michael Vick for dog-fighting and demand control of puppy mills.
Watch for Ruth Marcus and her feminists friends to continue their attacks on Sarah Palin. A successful pro-life woman who gives birth to a Down infant and won't demand the abortion of her grandchild threatens their entire world view. She must be destroyed for the sake of the cause. And if that requires twisting her words and manipulating the truth, well, what's new about that?
Mary Ann Kreitzer is a founder of the Catholic Media Coalition and LesFemmes-TheTruth.
RSS