Fisking Wendy Doniger September 11 2008
Wendy Doniger is the “Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School.” That’s an impressive title for someone who just wrote such a hateful, insane column about Sarah Palin. I have decided to do a line by line fisking of it:
Belief in god, like getting pregnant, is a private matter between consenting adults (or one consenting adult and one or more deities) and is no one else’s business. I am on record in this blog (and have not budged an inch) as not objecting to any candidate’s religious views.
There’s a first time for everything.
But I object strongly when anyone (and especially anyone with political power) tries to take their theology out in public, to inflict those private religious (or sexual) views on other people. In both sex and religion (which combine in the debates about abortion), Sarah Palin’s views make me fear that the Republican party has finally lost its mind.
Where have you been, professor? The Republican Party platform has been against the slaughter of unborn children for several years now. If we’ve ‘lost our minds’, which is how you define being pro-life, it happened some time ago.
As for sex, the hypocrisy of her outing her pregnant daughter in front of millions of people,
Palin didn’t “out” her daughter. It was no secret in Wasilla that her daughter is pregnant. She talked about the non-secret that her daughter is pregnant in order to combat extremely hateful liberal smears about her son Trig actually being her daughter’s son.
hard on the heels of her concealing her own pregnancy (her faith in abstinence applying, apparently, only to non-Palins),
Is she saying that people who advocate abstinence OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE are hypocritical for not advocating abstinence IN marriage? Is she really that bonkers?
is nicely balanced by her hypocrisy in gushing with loving support of her teenage daughter after using a line-item veto to cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers in Alaska.
That is another smear which has since been debunked. If TRIPLING the amount of money that her state spent to help teen mothers amounts to ‘cutting funding’ for teen mothers, then clearly my most fundamental understanding of Mathematics is completely wrong.
Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.
……..
What do you say to something like that? Does being conservative make you less of a woman? Hey, if that’s true, does being liberal make you less of a man? Hey Doniger, is Barack Obama a woman?
The Republican party’s cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!)
Keep it up, libs, elitism is working!
she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage.
Translation: Not only is Palin not a real woman, but if you’re a woman who supports her, you’re not a real woman either.
She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.
Why, because she’s not liberal? Only liberals care, right?
And as for religion, I’d love to know precisely how the Good Lord conveyed to her so clearly his intention to destroy the environment (global warming, she thinks, is not the work of human hands, so it must be the work of You Know Who),
Actually our conservative position is closer to the notion that global warming is complete BS made up by pseudo-environmentalist wackos, but it’s hard to keep track of all of our anti-woman, right-wing nuttiness, isn’t it, Doniger?
the lives of untold thousands of soldiers and innocent bystanders (He is apparently rooting for this, too, she says),
And the lives of untold millions of unborn babies… oops! Almost forgot. Doniger pretends that they don’t exist. But remember, every single person who has died in Iraq has either been a reluctant soldier in BUSH’S WAR or an innocent Iraqi bystander.
and, incidentally, a lot of polar bears and wolves,
As is typical of liberals, Doniger shows more sympathy for animals than she does for unborn human babies.
not to mention all the people who will be shot with the guns that she thinks other people ought to have.
If you think that we shouldn’t have a right to bear arms, then I suggest you propose an Amendment to the US Constitution to ban guns. Of course, cowardly anti-gun liberals would never do that, because they know that the backlash against them would be epic.
An even wider and more sinister will to impose her religious views on other people surfaced in her determination to legislate against abortion even in cases of rape
Does a child conceived through rape somehow cease to be a child? Since Palin does not support rape exceptions, you call her a religious fascist nut. If she did support a rape exception, you would be calling her a hypocrite. Either the unborn child has a right to life or he doesn’t.
and in her attempts to ban books, including books on evolution, and to fire the librarian who stood against her.
And yet another smear which has already been debunked. But who cares if what we’re saying is lies, because it’s fun to attack Sarah Palin. By the way, did you hear that Wendy Doniger likes to eat puppies? It must be true, I read it on the internet somewhere.
In dramatic contrast, Barack Obama was right to remark (of the teenage pregnancy) that you should back off from peoples’ families, a remark directed ostensibly to press coverage but one that could also, I think, be thrown back at Palin herself: don’t humiliate members of your family in order to get elected to public office.
Unfortunately for you, Obama is a complete hypocrite on this matter. While he impotently demands that the smearing of Palin and her family stop, the smears continue and become more and more vicious. Obama refuses to distance himself from his old buddies at Daily Kos who continue to attack Palin’s family. It’s all so much phony outrage.
And he was right to remark (of the religious implications of abortion), “I don’t presume to be able to answer these kinds of theological questions.”
That human life begins at the point of conception is a reality of modern science. It is not a religious point of view. The religious point of view is that since human life begins at conception, we should respect and protect that life.
Of course, it would be hard for Palin to follow this excellent policy,
Ignoring basic science in order to justify the slaughter of innocent humans amounts to “excellent policy”?
since it’s evident that almost her only qualification in the minds of McCain & co.is her family.
I keep forgetting, but, who is the first female Governor of Alaska, again?
Moreover, it’s hard to square Palin’s attitudes to both family privacy and abortion with the shifting policies of McCain himself, who, in 2000, said that any question of his own daughter’s pregnancy and/or abortion “would be a private decision that we would share within our family and not with anyone else,” and who, though describing himself as a “pro-life” candidate, said he would not ban abortion in the case of rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother, nor would he reverse Roe v. Wade.
Yes, John McCain has evolved a bit over the past eight years while you “progressive” folks have remained stagnant. Now McCain understands that since basic science informs us that life begins at the point of conception, and since Roe v. Wade is the worst, most activist decision in the history of the United States Supreme Court, that Roe needs to be overturned.
Joe Biden’s views are most relevant to the question at hand, since, as a Catholic, he shares much of Palin’s embryological theology: he believes life begins at conception.
It is not Catholic theology that life begins at conception. It is basic modern Biology that life begins at conception. The Catholic Church calls us, in the face of the scientific proof that life begins at conception, to defend that life. The theology is that innocent human life should be protected instead of killed, and as Catholics, we are obligated to live according to this philosophy. In this mission, Joe Biden is a miserable failure.
But he has gone out of his way to insist that he would not impose his personal views on others, and has indeed voted against curtailing abortion rights and against criminalizing abortion.
And yet he is forcing his personal views on the most innocent of all human beings, the unborn children in the womb.
That is the right answer. It’s in the Constitution. It’s not in the Bible, or the Qu’ran, or the Bhagavad Gita. It’s in the mother-lovin’ Constitution.
Unlike the right to bear arms for which you have so much contempt, Doniger, the US Constitution does not contain a right to murder children. It also does not contain the phrase “mother-lovin’”. It does, however, guarantee that NO ONE shall be deprived of LIFE without due process of law. You should try reading it sometime.
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