Six blog posts on conservative Christian opinion re. Palin:
Evangelicals surprise the media
Posted by Mollie
Sally Quinn, the atheist who professed knowing “practically nothing about religion or the internet” when she started the Washington Post/Newsweek religion site On Faith, had a curious admission in her most recent piece. Her essay is about how the news of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy will affect religious voters. She begins by admitting that Sen. John McCain’s pick of Gov. Sarah Palin angered her.
Anger seems to be a dominant feeling coming from the current mainstream media feeding frenzy. I have honestly never seen anything quite like what’s happening here.
I know reporters can get a bit out of control when dealing with their favorite issue (politics) — but I am actually shocked by the way journalists are handling this story. CNN, for instance, showed Barack Obama telling the media that Palin’s daughter should be off-limits — and then went right into a story that used Palin’s daughter’s teenage pregnancy as a hook to condemn abstinence education. It didn’t sit well with many viewers — and even a few of the commentators whose time on air followed the spot denounced it in the strongest terms. The mainstream media notoriously had to be forced to report on John Edwards’ baby drama. But the story of Palin’s daughter has made the front pages of most major papers.
Anyway, Quinn’s piece is a great example of why On Faith is better when it involves actual reporting. After copping to extreme anger and being insulted, she alleges that McCain’s pick will not go over well with “family values” voters. I almost stopped reading after she accused McCain of picking Palin because he’s trying to “win an election.” (Yes, I imagine that political calculation did go into his thinking, Sally.) Anyway, here we go:
And now we learn the 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant. She and the father of the child plan to marry. This may be a hard one for the Republican conservative family-values crowd to swallow. Of course, this can happen in any family. But it must certainly raise the question among the evangelical base about whether Sarah Palin has been enough of a hands-on mother.
McCain claims he knew about the pregnancy, and was not at all concerned. Why not? Not only do we have a woman with five children, including an infant with special needs, but a woman whose 17-year-old child will need her even more in the coming months. Not to mention the grandchild. This would inevitably be an enormous distraction for a new vice president (or president) in a time of global turmoil. Not only in terms of her job, but from a media standpoint as well.
Nice. Question her parenting skills and push the idea that women must put everything on hold until they have no concerns at home. Yay feminism! She actually goes on to say that women should not get involved in politics until their children are older. It’s like up is down in newsrooms. Anyway, what about her contention that evangelicals won’t support Palin? Here’s the best part:
Southern Baptist leaders like Richard Land and Al Mohler have praised McCain’s choice. But these are the same men who support this statement from the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message:
“A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.”
Okay, Quinn. You’re a reporter. Rather than quote this statement completely out of context, how about you pick up the phone (there should be one near your computer where you typed this piece) and call either of these men and ask them how this statement on marriage relates to women’s work outside the home.
Sheesh. Newsflash: Baptists believe the Bible to be sacred Scripture. Now read Ephesians 5. See how it says Christian marriage is about wives submitting to their husbands as the church submits to Christ? See how it says husbands are to sacrifice everything for and love their wives as Christ did for the church? This is basic Christian teaching. Does it play into whether Land and Mohler support or oppose Palin? I highly doubt it. But maybe you should ask them before you quote them completely out of context. I really don’t get what that statement has to do with Quinn’s story at all.
A far better story came from Associated Press, which discussed how evangelical voters would feel about the pregnancy news:
Key evangelical leaders rallied to Sarah Palin’s support Monday amid news that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was having a child.
“Before, they were excited about her, with the Down syndrome baby,” conservative, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist said. “But now with this, they are over the moon. It reinforces the fact that this family lives its pro-life values.” . . .
Evangelical leader Richard Land also backed Palin completely.
“This is the pro-life choice. The fact that people will criticize her for this shows the astounding extent to which the secular critics of the pro-life movement just don’t get it,” Land said in a statement.
“Those who criticize the Palin family don’t understand that we don’t see babies as a punishment but as a blessing. Barack Obama said that if one of his daughters made a mistake and got pregnant out of wedlock, he wouldn’t want her to be punished with a child. Pro-lifers don’t see a child as punishment.”
The immediate support of these major figures, who offered universal praise for the Palins’ actions after learning their daughter was pregnant, provides the filter through which conservative Christian voters will process the development.
Most important for Palin, an elder statesman of the movement, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, released a statement lauding the Palins for acting in keeping with the group’s policies and practices:
“We have always encouraged the parents to love and support their children and always advised the girls to see their pregnancies through, even though there will of course be challenges along the way. That is what the Palins are doing, and they should be commended once again for not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances.
“Being a Christian does not mean you’re perfect. Nor does it mean your children are perfect. But it does mean there is forgiveness and restoration when we confess our imperfections to the Lord. I’ve been the beneficiary of that forgiveness and restoration in my own life countless times, as I’m sure the Palins have,” Dobson said.
I said it was better — but it’s certainly not perfect. For one thing, I’m pretty sure Grover Norquist is no “key evangelical leader.” And while it’s well and good to get quotes from Land and others, what does it mean that they are the “filter through which conservative Christian voters will process the development”? Is this a reference to Michael Weisskopf’s Washington Post news article that claimed evangelicals were poor, uneducated and easy to command? And why is James Dobson’s statement “most important for Palin”? I don’t get why it would be more important than anything else.
[ An important point - the significance of opinions from "evangelical leaders" is they're an example of how evangelicals will likely see things. They're not, however, people who can or do tell masses of Christians how to think. [
Otherwise, it’s nice to see the media correctly quoting evangelical leaders. Usually they make them seem like dour fussybots intent on condemning everyone for everything. While it is true that they condemn sin — they also emphasize the importance of repentance and forgiveness. That part of the equation tends to be ignored by the press. These folks may take a hard line against sin that is proudly displayed or defiantly defended but they’re not going to condemn a teenage girl who is about to give birth to a child rather than abort it.
In other words, Quinn’s lack of knowledge about evangelicals shows. She should try talking to some and see if they really do match up with her stereotypes. Byron York of National Review has a fascinating piece about how the McCain team actually personally called “40 top evangelical and other cultural conservative leaders” and gave each a chance to respond. York reports that the response was unanimous support for Palin. He then goes to talk to a few delegations about the matter. Not surprising to anyone who knows human nature, some of the delegates speak about their own teenage pregnancies and how it brought them into the pro-life movement.
Another example of advancing stereotypes was found in a New York Times story a reader passed along. The headline and first graph promise tumult in the GOP and the story says that “social conservatives” and “groups that oppose abortion rights” may not continue to support Palin.
But then the article goes on to quote a ton of people and all of them — except for one Democrat — are completely supportive of Palin. The reporter even asks if Palin will be thrown off the ticket — despite the fact that no Republicans seem concerned, not even the evangelical types, and McCain says he knew (along with everyone in Wasilla) and he’s not concerned:
Early reaction among women at the Republican convention to the news about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy was almost uniformly supportive.
“This happens to people in all walks of life,” said Karen Minnis, 54, a state representative from Oregon.
She also said she had no problem with Governor Palin continuing to campaign while her daughter is pregnant and she herself has an infant son. . . .
When Pam Younggren, 61, of Fargo, N.D., was told the news of the 17-year-old’s pregnancy, she shrugged. “Well, she wouldn’t be the first one,” she said.
So the religious voters are not in tumult, as the New York Times claimed. It’s just bizarre headline/lede writing.
I actually think this story provides the perfect prism through which to analyze some evangelicals’ approach to sin, repentance and forgiveness. I think it has to be one of the most misunderstood aspects of evangelicals and would contribute greatly to the public discourse. Unless the media need to keep defining evangelicals who are politically conservative as bogeyman who should be feared by all, that is.
getreligion.org
newsweek.washingtonpost.com
On Being Hope
By John Mark Reynolds
Let me tell you about the woman I was lucky enough to marry.
Hope graduated with honors from an excellent private college. She is an outstanding trumpet player and a fine teacher in a private school. She has worked with college students for over a decade helping them become better students and people.
She chose to have four children and is raising them splendidly. Her homeschooling has given them a fine classical education and an appreciation of virtue. She has been involved in putting together support organizations for students like her children and giving advice to new mothers.
She reads widely and keeps well-informed on the issues of the day. She has attended education and philosophy seminars in many U.S. states and several countries.
Almost none of this work has been paid. As a result, she is frequently stereotyped by people who will not bother to know her and insist on measuring the value of work by the size of the paycheck. Her experience in forming organizations, keeping them alive and helping them flourish is discounted, because the organizations were not centered around money-making or governance.
Her wisdom and insight gained from talking to hundreds of young men and women is often trivialized, because she gained it by listening to conversations at a dining room table and not in an office.
People will often assume that she has no interest or knowledge in current events or societal crises, because she did not gain her wisdom in organizational structures that they acknowledge.
This has often made me angry, but she has remained cheerful despite it all. Her success in the social sphere has given her a measure of confidence and she does not get her self-worth from others.
The Three Spheres of Activity
Cultures are built through at least three spheres of activity. The first area of important work is government. The second is business. The third, nearly forgotten by some but no less vital than the others, is the social sphere that includes the family, volunteer work, and all the social services that are not produced by the state or by business.
It is good for a nation when the three spheres interlock and when wisdom from one type of experience enriches the work of another. There is, of course, expertise gained through concentrated activity in one area of activity. The different seasons of a person's life means that he or she will often find himself moving from one type of activity to another. For a few years a man or woman may do mostly unpaid work in the social sphere and in another season paid work in the world of business.
Success in one sphere does not guarantee success in another, but there are rare individuals who can "do more than one thing." Such people should be cherished, because they bring fresh insights to old systems along with their competence. We recognize this easily when an outstanding business leader like Mitt Romney moves from paid employment to the government sector. Business frequently hires aging political stars as Disney did with Senator George Mitchell, chairman of the board in the nineties.
We are not so good at seeing it when an outstanding social and civic leader like Sarah Palin moves into government. We discount everything she did that was not in the governmental or paid business arena.
That is foolish and wrong.
The Sarah Palin Woman
Sarah Palin was part of her family business, a community leader, and became an outstanding political leader. She is star in every area, something people who knew her in each role quickly recognized.
She is the rare talent who can navigate all three worlds (social, business, and government) and can flourish.
She is a quick study and brings to each role the insights gained from other spheres of success. There are truths mothers learn and she learned them well. There are things you learn doing hard physical labor in a family business and she learned those. There are vital insights you gain running social organizations that are not centered in profit and Palin grasped those. There is something you gain when you are the chief executive of a state larger than most nations and Palin flourished there.
Based only on her political experience, Palin would commend herself to America, but that is not all she is. To pretend that this is so is to denigrate the importance of the work of millions of Americans, most of them women. Not all these women can move from one area to another as Palin has done, but they will know how blessed we are to have in Palin a woman who can do so.
Palin brings the home-truths to government, but also governs well. Her government experience is vital to indicate to us that she is ready for this bigger government job, but her outstanding success in civic, family, and business areas should not be discounted or viewed with a patronizing attitude.
She is a person whose life did not consist merely of being an outstanding community leader, family leader, and business leader, but it includes success in all those roles with proven competence in governance.
She is a Renaissance woman, but for some bigots if that breadth of experience was not gained in paid employment or only in government than it counts less or does not count at all. That is offensive, though hard-working women like Palin mostly ignore it and cheerfully go on being awesomely competent.
My wife is one of those millions of women and she sees in many sneers about Palin (reducing this brilliant woman to the "beauty queen") yet another example of some peoples inability to value her experience. The Democratic Party should be warned that they are playing with electoral fire if they act as if all of Palin's life experience is not of value. My wife will not get mad, but she is getting active.
These women organize, they vote, and like Palin they often have large numbers of built-in precinct workers called children.
Let me stress that it is not that they believe that just any individual leader in the social sphere could be president. They do think their experience should not be ignored in the rare case of a brilliant talent who can do both.
Should we be shocked that this is possible? We have long allowed military and business background to be brought to the table. This is natural in the case of military experience since the president (the role the vice president must be prepared to fulfill) is commander in chief, but other experience must count given the present reach of government.
For good or bad, the modern state now deeply impacts the business world. Business leaders rightly rejoice when "one of their own" who understands this impact shows that rare and precious ability to switch spheres of activity and make their concerns known in the halls of governing power. Not all business leaders can manage the switch, as H. Ross Perot proved, but some can.
Mitt Romney, the man I backed for president, was no more qualified by government experience to be president than Sarah Palin . . . if we only count their time in politics. However, Romney's business background was correctly seen as a huge asset by most Americans. He faced little "qualifications" buzz though he was only a one-term governor of Massachusetts.
That was proper.
There should be no double standard for Sarah Palin's equally rich non-governmental experience. The fact that she has not spent her entire adult life in government is a good thing . . . providing we also know (as we do) that she can make the transition.
Does the government impact our social structures and families any less that it impacts business?
Are the skills gained in the PTA, civic leadership in small towns, and in family business of less value than those of the corporate tycoon?
Shouldn't every person rejoice that social policies and decisions will be made in a McCain administration with at least one person at the table who has shown outstanding civic, social, family, and business competence?
Where have we seen such a model for leadership training commended? Palin herself, and the millions of leaders like her, could tell you. Read Proverbs 31 and realize what she did for the years she was not a full-time government worker. Know how greatly a healthy culture values this work. Then stop and be stunned that for a decade and a half Sarah Palin showed that a few of these Proverbs 31 women can also be political dynamite.
Women like Palin do not ask for respect, they earn it. They may not like it when their previous work is denigrated, but they move on. That is wise.
That does not mean that the rest of us have to put up with narrow-minded foolishness that thinks only paid work gives valuable experience, that writing your own autobiography twice is always more interesting than helping run the family business and educating your kids, or that chattering as a guest on Sunday talk shows gives a better education than doing hard physical labor.
A wise culture would look at the sum of Sarah Palin's life and her experience and be thrilled to say:
"Give her the reward she has earned,
and let her works bring her praise at the city gate."
evangelicaloutpost.com
On Palin Pregnancy: What is wrong with Jonathan Martin?
John Mark Reynolds
Politics
09.01.2008
For the last weekend disgusting rumors related to Governor Sarah Palin’s youngest child have been circulating around the left-of-center new media. I will not repeat them here for the same reason I would not repeat sick and unfounded rumors about Senator Obama (which also exist).
Sadly, these rumors about Governor Palin gained some “credibility” when they were pushed by an increasingly disreputable writer on the Atlantic Monthly site (normally a sound source apart from this one writer).
Today the McCain camp apparently dumped all the “bad news” they had been able to find on Palin (disposing of the ludicrous notion she had not been vetted). This includes the “news” that her husband (who is not running for office) had a DUI twenty-two years ago. This “info dump” included the news that Palin is soon to be a grandmother. One of her daughters is pregnant (out of wedlock), is keeping the baby, and is getting married to the father. Part of the reason they had to release this information about a non-candidate was the more salacious rumor about the governor.
Governor Palin’s daughter is not running for any office. She made a bad choice and now is making two very good choices. She is getting married and she is keeping her baby. I don’t know anybody in the church whose response will not be compassion for her and hopes for her future happiness.
None of this should matter much to the campaign, but the Republican writer at Politico, Jonathan Martin, insulted social conservatives when he wrote:
Social conservatives, who are extraordinarly enthused by the selection of Palin, won’t be happy about the news. But their unease will likely be mitigated by the word that the teenager will give birth and marry the father.
I suppose this is true in the sense that nobody is happy about bad news in the families of people we admire. What does Mr. Martin mean by “unease?” I suspect he thinks an appreciable number of us will “judge” Governor Palin for her daughter’s bad behavior, but let her off the hook because Palin’s daughter “did the right thing.”
This is insulting and pretty stupid. Any group with millions of members has bad actors, but in forty-five years of church attendance and work inside the “social conservative” movement, I have personally known nobody I think would feel “unease” about the governor as a vice-presidential candidate based on this “news” about her daughter.
Why would they? What did the governor do?
Bluntly, this “news” is not politically relevant. What Christian thinks having the truth means we live it out perfectly? What parent believes they have total control over their nearly-grown up children?
This kind of writing by Mr. Martin represents either ignorance of the demographic he is writing about (which given their percentage of the party is inexcusable), the soft bigotry of much of mainstream culture against social conservatives (we are judgmental blue noses), or a major blunder in phrasing.
I assume the more charitable of the three, but it would be helpful if Mr. Martin clarified.
We pray for Governor Palin who has been faced with scurrilous and ugly false accusations about her family. She also has been facing a difficult situation in her private life (related to becoming a grandmother) and has handled it well. Let’s let the family go on with their private lives!
Here is hoping Martin learns a bit more about social conservatives before writing about them.
(Compare the treatment of Palin with the obvious cover up of the Edwards situation by the mainstream media. I urged charity to Edwards here so you know how I would react to misdeeds by Democratic candidate. )
scriptoriumdaily.com
When hypocrisy is not hypocrisy
It seems that some liberals are having a difficult time understanding what constitutes hypocrisy.
Consider the saga of Sarah Palin's teenage daughter, and this blog post at ABC News,
ABC News' Andy Fies reports: Although Barack Obama has said the pregnancy of Gov Sarah Palin’s unwed teenaged daughter is "off-limits" and has "no relevance", not all of his supporters agree.
Clinton Wray and his family sat among the 14,000 who gathered to hear Obama speak in Milwaukee this evening. While he supported Obama's decision to, in Wray's words, "take the higher ground", he was not convinced the pregnancy is irrelevant. "Republicans will say that they are the party of family values and that everybody else doesn't have any values. So when you’ve used that, I think the public and the media have the right to use whatever you’ve put out to come back to you."
Wray added that this applied to Palin too. "This young lady is saying that she's a strong conservative with Christian values. That's great. But the Republican party has consistently used the religious right to say 'we're Christians,' to say 'we don't believe in this and we don't believe in that.' And so I think they have to be held accountable…. She has to be held accountable."
To begin with, I'm not aware of any prominent Republicans stating that "everybody else doesn't have any values." To be sure, persons with alternative political affiliations hold values of some sort.
Yet I wonder exactly what type of accountability Mr. Wray would hold Sarah Palin to? It seems to me that, in her public statement on the issue, she made it clear that her daughter was choosing life for her unborn baby, that her daughter was going to get married to the child's father, that her daughter would have the full support of her and her husband, and that their full support was needed now that her daughter would learn about the reality of having made choices that fell outside the realm of "family values". It further seems to me that, rather than displaying hypocrisy, Palin is being fully consistent with the family values she claims to have. Honesty, love, commitment, and responsibility.
If Sarah Palin wished to be a hypocrite, she would have counseled her daughter to have a secret abortion, in order to preserve the family image, thereby allowing her to attend college (if she so desired) without the punishment of having to take care of a child at the same time.
Posted on September 02, 2008
rustylopez.typepad.com
Team Palin Just Keeps Soldiering On by Allen Thornburgh
I spent Labor Day out and about with our brood of five, in typical weather for D.C. in August -- which is to say hot -- my Blackberry fielding hyperventilating emails from my liberal friends about Bristol Palin the whole time. "OMG, this thing is going to blow UP!!!" "This is getting GOOD!" "McCain is totally blindsided, and his aides are furious ... it's looking like it's going to be Pawlenty!!" "The same Evangelicals who blew up over Britney Spears' sister are going to be outraged over the Palin girl!! If they don't, they're hypocrites!!"
Really?
As knowledgeable as the screed merchants at the Daily Kos seems to be about Evangelical opinions <<Snicker-Eyeroll Combo>>, I have to say that I haven't a clue why they think that Bristol Palin's pregnancy is some sort of show stopper for Evangelicals. For me, at least, it only makes me *more* enthusiastic.
Why? Because the Palins are Real People living a Real Life. That's simply rare for the celebrity politicos of our day. Barrack Obama, as likable as I find him as a person (not so much his political philosophy), typical of a D.C. politician, has lived a life nothing like the life that most of America leads, devoid of the normal challenges of a Real Life.
Immediately after law school, Obama began carefully crafting his political future as a "community organizer." More like "community agitator," as, in this role, his duty was to find groups in whom he could cultivate a sense of victimization and disenfranchisement, and then direct them toward government and business with demands for resources. Then more of the same, but with a more sophisticated flavor, as a state legislator and senator, and with the further pleasure of being seen as the up-and-coming Golden Child by his party. During that time, he and his wife became quite wealthy in their various power career positions.
I can't fault Obama for that. But it isn't the life that many Americans lead. Sarah Palin's life looks a lot more familiar to us: a middle-class life, building a small business, getting involved in kids' sports and the PTA, and dealing with difficult decisions. Decisions like "Wow, I'm going to be 44 when I have this child ... and he's got Downs ... do I keep him?" Decisions like "Wow, my 17-year-old daughter is pregnant ... what do I counsel her to do?"
Modern Western society dictates that Team Palin is supposed to view themselves as victims in these problems, hunker down, focus on themselves, and suck their thumbs. But they don't.
Team Palin keeps taking responsibility, fielding Real Life's toughest challenges and making the rare right decision.
I love that. To heck with the Entitlement Generation's victim mentality. America was built by those who eschewed such self-pity, fearlessly took responsibility for themselves, and soldiered ahead. Sarah Palin is clearly such a soldier, and I enthusiastically salute her.
(Image © Al Grillo/Associated Press)
thepoint.breakpoint.org
Why the Palin Baby Story Matters
What it means to evangelical voters.
NRO
By Byron York
St. Paul — At 6:30 Monday morning, at a hotel here in St. Paul, a team of senior McCain staffers got word from even more senior staffers that there was news about vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin. Everybody had heard the rumors, spread on The Atlantic and DailyKos websites, that Palin’s fifth child, Trig, born last April, was not really hers — that Trig was really Palin’s 17 year-old daughter’s child, and Palin faked pregnancy to cover up her daughter’s condition. None of that was true, they all knew. But the top McCain staffers revealed that a story would be breaking on the wires in a few hours reporting that Palin’s daughter, Bristol, is, in fact, pregnant now. The father is Bristol’s boyfriend, the staffers were told, and she intends to marry him.
The McCain aides’ assignment was to call a list of about 40 top evangelical and other cultural conservative leaders.Each one would get a personal explanation of the story, and each was asked for his or her reaction. The McCain people reached nearly everyone before the story broke, and the verdict was unanimous — all the leaders supported Palin and her place on the McCain ticket.
The news spread throughout the day as GOP delegates arrived at the Xcel Energy Center for an abbreviated first session of the convention. Unlike the press, which was buzzing about the story from the first moment, a number of delegates were in the dark for a good part of the day; they were going from event to event, often on a bus, and didn’t have time to catch up. Nobody did a poll or took a roll-call vote, so it’s not exactly clear how many support Palin and McCain’s choice of her as vice president. But the number appears to be very, very high.
When the day’s business was over, I drifted around the Colorado and Ohio delegations — two critical swing states — to get a feel for the delegates’ reaction. In the Colorado section, I ran into Sue Sharkey, from Windsor. When I asked what she thought, her reaction was not about Palin but herself.
“For me personally, it hit my heart this morning,” Sharkey told me, “because I was a 17 year-old girl, just like Sarah Palin’s daughter, and I had — I was in those shoes. And my son is with me, who will be 35 years old next week, and so I know what a difficult road there is for her.”
“I chose to have my son, and from that point I realized that I was a very strong right-to-life advocate,” Sharkey continued, her voice wavering ever so slightly. Roe v. Wade had been passed just the year before, and I already knew girls who were going through abortions. It wasn’t a choice for me; it wasn’t in my heart to do that. So when I heard the news this morning, it struck close to home for me.”
A few feet away, members of the Ohio delegation were finishing up business, and I asked Patricia Murray, a delegate from Cincinnati, what she thought. “I don’t even think this is an issue,” she told me. “It’s a family issue. It’s a personal issue. The only reason it was made public was because of her mother.” Nearby, Ben Rose, a delegate from Lima, said that, “In every case where I heard delegates talk about this, the first thought was to the human nature of it.”
Earlier in the day, just after I heard the news, I called Marlys Popma, the well-known Iowa evangelical leader who is now the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign. Like Sue Sharkey from Colorado, Popma had a story to tell.<b<> It turns out she had had a child out of wedlock nearly 30 years ago, and it changed her life. “It was my crisis pregnancy that brought me into the movement,” Popma told me. “My reaction is that this shows that the governor’s family is just like so many families. That’s how my first child came into the world, and I’m just thrilled that [Bristol Palin] is choosing to give this child life.”
I asked Popma what she thought the larger reaction among evangelicals will be. “Their reaction is going to be exactly as mine,” she told me. “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation. Many of us are in this movement because of something that has happened in our lives.”
As for now, at least, evangelicals seem to be completely on Palin’s side. And McCain’s. This is a group that has been skeptical of McCain in the past. Now, it’s probably fair to say that he has never been more popular among evangelicals than he is at this moment. Whether that will last, or whether Palin will cost McCain support among other voters, is not yet clear. But within the confines of the Republican Convention, McCain’s surprising choice of Palin — and the equally surprising news about her family — is paying off.
—
Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.
National Review Online - article.nationalreview.com |
