Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, Politics, Religion, Feminism and Infaticide

Lore linked to an article on the current Brouhaha raging over Sarah Palin. Reading it I couldn’t help but agree with much of what author Camille Paglia writes. But it wasn’t until the end that I nearly stopped dead in my tracks.

She writes,

Let’s take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body.

…

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.

Emphasis mine.

Its shocking. And I can literally not wrap my mind around how someone can freely admit that abortion is indeed murder, the “extermination of the powerless by the powerful” and then fiercely defend her right to do just that, or in her own word, her right to “unconstrained access to abortion on demand”.

*sigh*

She did make some astute observations. Note the following:

Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics — which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama’s campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don’t see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.

She notes, and I agree, that the same tactics have been used on Obama. Sometimes I just wish people would refrain from hysterical and grossly ignorant gossip that frequently flies willy nilly through the media (all forms, mainstream and private [blogs, i’m looking at you]) during the political seasons. I take that back. Not sometimes, all the time. But that’s an absurd request. You can’t expect grown adults to behave maturely. History teaches us that.

It is nice to see Palin’s star on the rise, and its true her media splash has all but eclipsed Obama. Which is good, because campaigns are won and lost on media coverage, a sad affair, but true. Words need not be true to be effective, and the vast portion of information delivered to us by the “media” is misleading at best and false at worst.

Oh well. Lord come quickly…