A Lot of Women Like Sarah Palin
Category : Women Diary
Some polls are suggesting that after gaining an initial bump, McCain’s campaign is being hobbled by Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential candidacy. The voters who are deserting her fastest, some of whom are even calling on her to withdraw, are mostly women. Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin declares herself a fervent “pro-lifer.†As such, she has taken not just an anti-abortion position, but even an anti-contraceptive one. She believes in promoting abstinence — and abstinence only — in sex education classes, even as her 17-year-old daughter’s unplanned pregnancy might well have opened her eyes to the weakness (and futility) of such a policy.
One question that Sarah Palin should answer during tomorrow’s debate is why, during her tenure as mayor of Wasilla, the town started charging rape victims or their insurers for hospital emergency-room rape kits and examinations. The policy so outraged the Alaska Legislature that in 2000 it passed unanimously a bill forbidding such fees. But Palin has never explained why, under her leadership, the town stopped picking up the cost of the swabs, specimen containers, and tests. Ms. Palin owes voters an explanation.
What was the thinking behind cutting the measly few thousand dollars needed to cover the yearly cost of swabs, specimen containers and medical tests? Whose dumb idea was it to make assault victims and their insurance companies pay instead? Unfortunately, her campaign is shielding the candidate from the press, so Americans may still be waiting for answers on Election Day.
Generally, victims of sexual assault have the option of an emergency contraception pill, which some opponents of abortion consider tantamount to abortion itself. Does Palin support the decision two years ago of the US Food and Drug Administration to allow over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception pills?
According to our friends over at Politifact, while Wasilla had such a rape kit policy while Palin was mayor, there is no evidence that she explicitly endorsed it. “Wasilla clearly had the policy. Bloggers have portrayed it as a heartless rule seeking money from rape victims, but they have neglected to mention that the policy seems to have been aimed more at getting money from insurance companies than from victims. We can’t find that Palin ever commented on the policy, pro or con. But as mayor, she indirectly endorsed it by approving city budgets that relied on the revenue.”
Whether the fee-for-kits policy reflected Palin’s budgetary zeal or her extreme view on abortion, voters deserve to know. As Alaska’s governor in 2000, Tony Knowles, put it: “We would never bill the victim of a burglary for finger-printing and photographing the crime scene, or for the cost of gathering other evidence.”
The hatred women have for Sarah Palin, and others had for Hillary before her, is not necessarily about politics. Anybody can run the numbers on how many people Palin’s pro-life, pro-gun, socially conservative policies will seduce and how many they will alienate. Rather, the test that the McCain campaign failed to put her through was the Abbotsleigh Ladies College test. (Named after my high school. Go, green and gold!). It’s a simple three-point pass-fail exam: Will the other girls like her?
History is not on Palin’s side. Every time a woman gets a plum job, be she Hewlett-Packard’s ex-boss, Carly Fiorina, or CBS’s Katie Couric, there’s always that whispery fear that people will think she got the job just because she’s a woman. So if things don’t go well — and a couple of YouTube clips have suggested that they’re certainly not going well for Palin — women are the first to turn on her for making it harder for the rest of us to louse up at work.
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