The Palin Debate and the 10th Anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death
September 22, 2008 | Filed Under Election 2008, Opinion and Commentary | One Response
UPDATE: Within days of my writing this, Sarah Palin had done her Katie Couric interviews and had demonstrated several times more what a shallow and moronic candidate she is. So the limelight she once enjoyed is finally casting a sickly green pallor, but she has still not been questioned about her Church and it’s extreme views. – September 28.
Governor Sarah Palin is scheduled to debate Senator Joe Biden on October 2. Given the softball interviews that Palin has enjoyed so far, this could be her first and only trial by tough questions. Unlike two of the three presidential debates that will have specific focus–foreign policy and national security, domestic policy and economic issues, the one and only Palin-Biden debate is not set up to be topical. The effort to conceal Governor Palin’s lack of depth extends to a forum that ought to be the place to drill, baby, drill for candidates’ views. Instead, according to the Washington Post, Republicans sought a format that would “limit the amount of time available for their neophyte candidate, Palin, to be questioned on a single topic.”
We have every right to expect, or even demand, that the debate will bring a different sort of attention to the self-proclaimed Hockey Mom who would be VP (or P if you consider the actuarial tables and the extent of her ambitions). Although the Palin idolatry is subsiding, Mrs. Palin has for the most part enjoyed life in the kind of instant and exaggerated celebrity zone usually reserved for the talent-free stars manufactured by record companies and television, in short, a No Time for Questions On A Single Topic Zone. In this zone of silence, she remains a news sensation, and her magazine covers outnumber her answers to serious public questions.
As October approaches, a very different, decade-old news sensation is on my mind. Shortly after midnight on October 7, 1998 Aaron J. McKinney and Russell A. Henderson entered a Laramie, Wyoming bar and offered a young gay man a ride in their pickup truck. As anyone who was awake in 1998 and 1999 knows, that young man was 21-year old Matthew Shepard. The full description of what these men did to Shepard is staggering, but the brief version is that they drove him to an open field outside of town, tied him to a fence, beat him so badly that his skull fractures later proved to be inoperable, and left him for dead in near freezing temperatures. Matthew Shepard died five days later without regaining consciousness.
I bring this up because Mrs. Palin hasn’t really been made to answer questions on her extremist views, including her view that homosexuality is so distasteful and sinful that it should not be explained to young people, and has instead enjoyed chats masquerading as interviews with Charlie, Charlie, Charlie Gibson and Sean Hannity. All the while there are enough controversial Sarah Palin videos and transcripts on the Web to start an archive for a Hate is a Family Value Museum. To the best of my knowledge, Palin has not made any public statement endorsing or supporting the ‘pray away the gay’ seminars and sermons at the Wasilla Assembly of God, the church she has attended and prayed in for the past six years. On the other hand, she has not made any statement to counter her church’s messages. (Think of Barack Obama strongly condemning the views of Reverend Wright in front of millions of viewers.)
Even though it is clear that Sarah Palin makes no effort to separate church and state, she has fortunately done relatively little legislative damage with her views. But it doesn’t take anti-gay legislation or anti-choice legislation or anti-evolution legislation to feed fresh victims to the culture warriors. Palin need only be the pretty wolf-killing, gun-toting, pray-away-the-gay, book-disapproving, anti-choice, church-going poster girl. She doesn’t have to take questions about her positions, sequestered from the real press as she’s been. All she has to do is go to Vice Presidential Study Hall, memorize McCain texts, and show up for the cameras.
Unfortunately, the belief that homosexuality is a sin isn’t a showstopper for McCain-Palin voters. If some of her other nut job assertions aren’t going to do it, this one doesn’t have a chance. Even among more enlightened folks it is still okay to marginalize the rights of gays, or to assert that such matters are trivial when we have “real” problems, like an economy to fix.
The Assembly of God can go on praying away the gay, an effort that is, thank anyone’s God, doomed to failure. Sarah can go on questioning librarians about stocking books that foster an understanding of homosexuality. And come October 2, unless Gwen Ifill asks Mrs. Palin about her own or her church’s extremist views, the Republican base’s newest celebrity can go on implicitly getting out the theo-con vote. Worse still, while the Shepard family remembers a different October night, Sarah Palin will get another free ride into the adoring crowd and the bright lights that she seems to love more than moose burgers, snow machining, and the First Dude combined. And in some town in America–maybe even Wasilla–someone will think it is okay to take a kid out into the night and slay away the gay.
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“Please help your children understand diversity without fearing it. Be an example of acceptance and compassion. The consequences of hate hurt everyone. It hurts not only the victim–it hurts their family and friends. It destroys the families of the perpetrators. Lives are lost, lives are ruined and lives are changed forever.” – Judy Shepard, on the seventh anniversary of her son Matthew’s death, October 12, 2005.
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For an interesting short documentary video that raises some questions about Sarah Palin’s religious beliefs, see “Palin’s Apocalypse,” by Harry Hanbury. Hanbury also asks why no one is questioning Palin about her beliefs: