Loading ...
The Thinking Housewife (I’m still looking for my own . . .) explains why Sarah Palin’s candidacy was one more liberal nail in the conservative coffin. (This was supposed to go in Ephemeris, but I have forgotten how to do that.)
The would-be empress has no clothes: Sarah Palin not a dedicated mother, not fit to be president
10 Responses to “The would-be empress has no clothes: Sarah Palin not a dedicated mother, not fit to be president”
Comments are currently closed.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
I have to say, this seemed to me kind of silly and not at all convincing. The charge that it was exploitative for Palin to use her Down Syndrome son to bolster her credibility as an advocate of the disabled is particularly ridiculous – politicians do that kind of thing all the time, and furthermore, it’s completely plausible. Everyone is liable to be more sensitive to the concerns of people whose struggles they have shared. There’s nothing wrong with pointing this out, and furthermore, the actual parents of disabled children seem to have responded to Palin in an overwhelmingly positive way. I think they would be the most qualified judges of whether or not Palin’s treatment of the issue was exploitative.
I have no strong views on Sarah Palin as a politician, and I certainly won’t pretend to grasp all the intricacies of her personal family life, but there’s hardly any real analysis here of her actual political views or history. What it boils down to is mostly just disapproval of a woman and mother running for office at all. Which just seems petty. It’s as if these women feel that they can’t be respected as housewives unless all married women everywhere follow suit. There is a decidedly defensive air to these comments, which is unseemly. And also wildly out of touch with reality, because they seem to be assuming that the Republican party has heretofore been supportive of this very rigidified notion of gender roles; I see no evidence that this is the case. Nor do I see why the GOP ought to endorse such a vision; one can believe in gender differentiation without holding to such hard and fast rules as, “no woman should ever run for office unless there isn’t a single man anywhere who could possibly do the job effectively.”
“What it boils down to is mostly just disapproval of a woman and mother running for office at all.”
Yes, a woman and a mother running for office at all is a thing to be disapproved of. But that’s not all. She decided to run for vice-president(ess) even though she was the new mother of a young and disabled child who desperately needs her around and at home, not gallavanting around the country on campaign. And she ran for vice-president even though this resulted in massive public disgrace for her daughter when she got pregnant. That’s why God invented a wonderful division of labor by creating us male and female — so at least one parent could always stay home to see to these things even if one had to leave. Palin’s husband should have put his foot down for his family’s sake and said, “No, we need you more than the country needs you.”
“It’s as if these women feel that they can’t be respected as housewives unless all married women everywhere follow suit.”
An un-called for ad hominem. I don’t see it at all.
“There is a decidedly defensive air to these comments, which is unseemly.”
Please specify where the author was defensive. Seemed pretty *offensive* and calmly argued to me.
“And also wildly out of touch with reality, because they seem to be assuming that the Republican party has heretofore been supportive of this very rigidified notion of gender roles; I see no evidence that this is the case.”
No, the Republican Party has not been supportive of rigid notion of gender roles. Which shows that the party is not really conservative.
” Nor do I see why the GOP ought to endorse such a vision; one can believe in gender differentiation without holding to such hard and fast rules as, “no woman should ever run for office unless there isn’t a single man anywhere who could possibly do the job effectively.””
That war was lost when women won the vote. Which was and is a mistake. The idea of female suffrage is simply a modern liberal error. Don’t send a woman to do a man’s job, and until the 19th century that included exercising political suffrage in one’s own name. I don’t agree with universal manhood suffrage either, but there was a reason it was called “manhood” suffrage. Why? Well, should women be soldiers? No, they should not. Well, political and military duties were traditionally united. A free citizen with suffrage was expected to participate in the militia. A woman was neither subject to military conscription nor able to exercise suffrage. I resisted my urge to like Ann Coulter until she admitted publicly that women should not have the right to vote. Then I decided that for all of my criticisms of her I still like her. And the Thinking Housewife has written on why republican (she uses the word “democratic”) government ideally should be a government of *fathers*: http://www.thinkinghousewife.com/wp/2009/10/fatherhood-and-democracy/
So I completely and absolutely agree: no woman should ever run for office unless there isn’t a single man anywhere who could possibly do the job effectively. That question should be a litmus test for being a true anti-feminist or not. One of the curses that God says He will bring upon the wicked is that “women will rule over them.”
Now, before someone brings up queens regnant, that is an absolutely different situation. Queens regnant rule by defect — the lack of a male heir or the death of a male husband. Plus, they inherit their rule, they do not choose it. They function as the sole female heir or widow runs a private estate — the state has been entrusted to their family and through a natural defect they have through no fault of their own become the head of the household. That happens. But in a republic there is never a reason why some eligible man cannot be found for the role. So running for office (running in one’s own name, not ruling in the name of one’s family) and accepting a political position in a republic is not at all like being a Queen Isabella.
Isaias 3:12 — “11 Woe to the wicked unto evil: for the reward of his hands shall be given him. 12 As for my people, their oppressors have stripped them, and women have ruled over them. O my people, they that call thee blessed, the same deceive thee, and destroy the way of thy steps.”
Palin’s daughter was nearly grown, and obviously behaving like a grown woman, and in any case I don’t see why her public disgrace would have been lessened by her father running for office as opposed to her mother – it would have been the subject of media attention in any case. I wouldn’t consider this a foolish reason for the parents to retire from public life, but I don’t think it’s my place to tell them that they’re obliged to do so. The comments indicate that the baby’s young parents would probably have been reconciled if not for the political pressure, but that just seems like wild speculation – who really knows what the family dynamic is like? Nothing about Palin’s handling of the question has ever seemed inappropriate to me – she has neither defended her daughter’s missteps, nor tried to distance herself from her family.
Similarly, her infant needed care, and that’s something for her to calculate in making decisions about her political career, but I don’t think outsiders need to be making those calculations for her. Has anyone produced evidence that the Palin children are neglected, other than the mere fact that their mother is in politics? If not, then leave it alone. It’s nosy to speculate too much about the intricacies of other people’s family arrangements.
I certainly believe that there are differences between men and women, but it irritates me when people feel a need to block these out into cookie-cutter rules that obscure the subtleties of the issue. Women’s suffrage seems to me like a good example of a question that need not be answered definitively and for all time; one can make an argument that it was or is a mistake in a particular time and place, and I will entertain such a case genially. But I scoff at the idea that it is inherently contrary to a woman’s nature to exercise any direct political voice. Likewise, the question of how women should properly be involved in political affairs is complicated, and different societies might appropriately handle it in different ways. I’m not outraged that we’ve never had a female president, and I won’t hold it against a person for preferring to see men in positions of power, but again, I’m just not going to be shocked or scandalized by the possibility of women holding office. There just aren’t any hard and fast rules here; the differences between the sexes are more subtle and more mysterious than that.
The argument against female soldiers is much stronger, in part because of legitimate physical differences, but also because of the dynamic that needs to be fostered within an army. Soldiers need to see their unit as a kind of brotherhood, and adding women to the mix completely transforms the dynamic. On the other hand, I don’t necessarily object to women being employed by the military as linguists, engineers, nurses etc.
Now, as for defensive comments:
It’s hard enough for traditional women to convince husbands, family and friends that raising children and running a home are a full-time job. If a woman can be a “dedicated mother” and a president at the same time, their arguments will receive no moral support even from the country’s leading conservative party.
Here the concern seems pretty clear. How can *I* look respectable as just a housewife if other wives/mothers are running for president?
People need to get their dictionaries out and find out what “dedicated” means. My dictionary says: wholly committed to something. Palin is NOT wholly committed to parenting. She is partially committed. That makes the whole thing a lie.
Again, a strong need to assert that full time wives and mothers do it better. Stated very tendentiously, I might add. And anyway, the (implicit) argument is silly. Can a person not be dedicated to more than one thing in life? That would be unfortunate indeed.
Certainly if not one man in this country can be found to run for president, there must be some single woman somewhere with nothing better to do.
So, politicians must be people with “nothing better to do.” Sorry, that sounds both silly and rather defensive to me.
The passage you cite is weak evidence indeed. The mere fact of being subjugated and “ruled over” is obviously the greatest evil here. That lower-status citizens should exclusively be given the job adds to the indignity, but it’s a very far step from this brief reference to a clear-cut rule that women should never exercise political power unless absolutely necessary. If this is the best Scriptural evidence that can be mustered, I’m not going to worry too much for Sarah Palin’s soul.
“Palin’s daughter was nearly grown, and obviously behaving like a grown woman, and in any case I don’t see why her public disgrace would have been lessened by her father running for office as opposed to her mother – it would have been the subject of media attention in any case.”
Sarah Palin is the mother. She did not have to take on the extra responsibilities of office — including her mayoral gubernatorial offices — at the time she did. She volunteered. A mother missing in action and a child who misbehaves while still living at home. No, we cannot say that this would not have taken place had she not assumed public office. But absolutely she, the mother, placed extra burdens on her time and attention when it was unnecessary.
“Similarly, her infant needed care, and that’s something for her to calculate in making decisions about her political career, but I don’t think outsiders need to be making those calculations for her. Has anyone produced evidence that the Palin children are neglected, other than the mere fact that their mother is in politics? If not, then leave it alone. It’s nosy to speculate too much about the intricacies of other people’s family arrangements.”
Many people publicly praise Sarah Palin as a dedicated mother and evince proofs of this. So the issue has been raised by others, not by her critics. How do we define “dedicated”? Dedicated parents make big sacrifices for their children. What has Palin sacrificed *for her children*? What has she sacrificed *specifically for them*? She definitely did sacrifice the amount of time and attention she could devote to them in order to pursue her career. She is definitely extraordinarily dedicated to politics given the fact that she ran for vice-president while she had an infant and a pregnant teenaged daughter and she had the opportunity not to do this. This is not nosy. This is simply obvious. We have only so much time and attention in our lives and there is no way that the children are not losing something in this deal. They are losing maternal time and attention.
“distance herself from her family”
Adopting great and completely unnecessary burdens entails much distancing from her family.
“but it irritates me when people feel a need to block these out into cookie-cutter rules that obscure the subtleties of the issue”
Until the 1800s, no one would have dreamt that keeping women out of politics was “cookie-cutter.” No one would have seen any subtlety here. The public and domestic spheres are distinct and the former is the charge of heads of households, i.e. men, not women. Only the modern world is “subtle” on this point.
“The argument against female soldiers is much stronger, in part because of legitimate physical differences, but also because of the dynamic that needs to be fostered within an army. Soldiers need to see their unit as a kind of brotherhood, and adding women to the mix completely transforms the dynamic. On the other hand, I don’t necessarily object to women being employed by the military as linguists, engineers, nurses etc.”
And in a republic the politicians decide how wars are fought. And the president is the commander-in-chief. Do we want our commanders to be people who are constitutionally incapable of fulfilling the role played by the people they command? Statesmen need to display great amounts of thymos — masculine thymos, which is not the same as a woman’s thymos. It is entirely appropriate and actually becoming for a woman in a desperate problem to break down emotionally (weep, etc.) and turn in tears to her husband. This is absolutely not acceptable in someone who is expected to make decisions in such situations. We should not make women play the role of men. And women in politics much play with the Big Boys, which means they will not be permitted to display the typical and becoming feminine traits. There is a great deal of subtlety involved in the reality — and that subtlety backs up the proposition that women should not be permitted to exercise suffrage or run for public office.
Yes, some exceptional women exercise charismatic roles in public life. This has always occurred despite the standard rules. They are of such a charismatic sort that even their exclusion from suffrage and actual office does not thwart their salutary role. So the normalization of female participation in public life does not actually assist these charismatic exceptions to the rule. Those women quite literally are not held down.
“Here the concern seems pretty clear. How can *I* look respectable as just a housewife if other wives/mothers are running for president?”
This is a legitimate defensive concern. I did not realize that “defensive” automatically meant “bad.” It is true that when women run for president this will contribute to the social stigma attached to being “just” a wife and mother. As Palin did *not* have greatness thrust upon her and could have chosen a different track, it is legitimate to point out that her *choice* to pursue the second highest office in the land while trying to raise a family is more grist for the feminist mill — women should pursue careers outside the home despite the most pressing family concerns at home. In fact, they should seek and accept jobs and public stature much higher than that their husbands possess. So yes, the culture of life and tradition will lose on account of Sarah Palin. A generation of “conservative” little girls will grow up dreaming of the presidency instead of being content with the Little Way of providing for their husbands and children. In this sense, defensiveness is merited — the Palin candidacy was an offense. My favorite feminist, Camille Paglia, is a big fan of Palin precisely because of her not-so-stealth feminism.
“Again, a strong need to assert that full time wives and mothers do it better. Stated very tendentiously, I might add. And anyway, the (implicit) argument is silly. Can a person not be dedicated to more than one thing in life? That would be unfortunate indeed.”
I call bull. First, yes, all things being equal, the more time wives and mothers have to devote to their husbands and their children, the better. The implicit argument is not tendentious. The author of the piece goes to church and has a blog and reads and writes and clearly is interested in the greater world. But does that prevent her from being at home with her children every day and every night or from packing her husband’s lunch? No. Sarah Palin could not possibly tuck her kids in every night because *she took up an unnecessary, demanding job that required her to travel across country all the time and deal with gigantic concerns.* No, truly dedicated mothers do not make such unnecessary demands upon her children. She placed her career (or, to be generous, the national welfare) above her own husband and kids, who definitely were going to have to make huge sacrifices *for her.* And dedicated mothers do not demand sacrifices of their families like that. Dedicated mothers are the ones who make the sacrifices.
“So, politicians must be people with “nothing better to do.” Sorry, that sounds both silly and rather defensive to me.”
No one should ever do anything if they have something better to do. Sarah Palin had better things to do than try to fix the country. She should have done the job she already had and finished giving all the possible attention she could to her husband and kids. Every woman with a family has that responsibility. If a woman must play a man’s role in the world, better a single woman do it because she won’t be depriving a family of a wive and mother in order to do it. That’s all that the author meant and that is neither silly nor defensive, except of traditional virtues.
“The passage you cite is weak evidence indeed. The mere fact of being subjugated and “ruled over” is obviously the greatest evil here.”
No, that is not the greatest evil. If God said, “I’ll send you just judges to rule you,” would that be an insult? The greatest evil is being ruled in public by women, who should experience the rule of men within the house. It is the reversal of roles that so humiliated. Gentiles should not rule Israelites, women should not rule men, and children should not rule their elders, yet God punished the Israelites by subjecting them to the rule of Gentiles, women, and youths. You should read more of the third chapter of Isaias before lashing out:
“4 And I will give children to be their princes, and the effeminate shall rule over them. 5 And the people shall rush one upon another, and every man against his neighbour: the child shall make it tumult against the ancient, and the base against the honourable.”
It is not the status of being ruled but of being ruled by children and the effeminate (verse 4) and of being ruled by women (12). The rule of women violates the natural order. Queens are fine if the male heir is too young or if you’re in a country that doesn’t follow the Salic Law. But in a republic there is no reason why men should ever chafe under the rule of a woman. It is quite right for men to be contemptuous of being ruled by a woman when this can be avoided.
And in a republic, I point out, women do not rule as queens, duchesses, etc., i.e. in a suitably feminine and maternal manner. No, in a republic women rule in exactle the same official manner and possess exactly the same office as men do. It is absolutely contrary to natural impulses for men to behave toward a woman in such a situation in the same way they would toward a man. A knight can say that he is defending his queen’s honor, etc., which is a perfectly male response to a woman. You wouldn’t really want people in the White House treating Sarah Palin as a sort of queen as this is not what her job calls for.
And furthermore, Sarah Palin has more children at home other than her firstborn. I’d hope that the first one’s pregnancy and the exposure that brought about would make her reconsider the burden that will fall upon her other children.
This is different from the situation with a man because a man’s vocation as head of the household does, by definition, require him to go out into the broader world in order to provide for his family. He will be out there anyway. And he will make difficult decisions if he thinks it’s in the family interest. It does seem rather different and worse for a mother to psersit in a public career as her attitude toward her child and grandchild will be different. After the vice-presidential candidacy ended and she rather lightly resigned the office that the citizens of Alaska had entrusted to her, she could have retired from public life and helped raise her grandchild, who know has a single mom who estranged from the father. But instead she’s basically setting up a presidential run. Yes, I’d say that shows where her priorities lie. So I don’t see where anyone can claim that she’s “dedicated.” That’s not an epithet that we should just ascribe to mothers who don’t abort children. That is a title that is earned and I don’t see how Palin’s behavior merits the title.
And of course we are only going on the basis of what is reported in the media. That’s why this is a thought experiment. But the principles are exposed through the analysis of the thought experiment. Palin’s public career would, it seems, indicate that the word “dedicated” is not an apt description.
As for the author’s (Laura Wood, aka “The Thinking Housewife) failure to address Palin’s political stances, that was not the topic. If a priest turned away from his pastoral duties in order to pursue a political career, I’d have problems even if he had a good political platform and would perform well. It is very highly likely that his business is elsewhere.
‘Her infant needed care, and that’s something for her to calculate in making decisions about her political career, but I don’t think outsiders need to be making those calculations for her. Has anyone produced evidence that the Palin children are neglected, other than the mere fact that their mother is in politics? If not, then leave it alone. It’s nosy to speculate too much about the intricacies of other people’s family arrangements.’
A fine example of begging the question. The ‘mere fact’ that Sarah Palin is in politics, and thus involved in an unusually stressful, time-consuming and exhausting full-time career, is exactly what is being alleged as being incompatible with her being a good mother. The argument is simple; being a good mother is a full-time job, and cannot be done properly as a part-time job. It is impossible to do more than one full-time job at once. Taking on another full-time job thus means that you are not able to be a good mother. You don’t have to think that women should not have the vote to see this. If Palin’s children had grown up and left home, aside from the Down’s Syndrome one, I would not see any problem with her being in politics, but they haven’t.
“The public and domestic spheres are distinct and the former is the charge of heads of households, i.e. men, not women. Only the modern world is “subtle” on this point.”
No, no, this is so far from true! First of all, the public and domestic spheres have never been all that distinct; they mingle and touch in all sorts of ways. And second, the appropriate relationships of men and women within society (and within the domestic sphere) have never been completely settled and clear-cut. Quite the contrary, the idea that they are is the pervasive modern error, which sometimes manifests itself in a desire to eradicate all distinction between the sexes, and sometimes, in a reactionary response to the first movement, as a desire to draw excessively simplistic and rigid rules for their boundaries. Each of these extremes feeds and encourages the other, and both are stultifying to real romance and harmonious relations between the sexes. In fact, it’s important to recognize that there is a complimentarity between the sexes, but the nature of this difference is mysterious and subtle; to some degree our sensibilities ought to be shaped to expect certain things, but trying to force gender relations into these, yes, cookie-cutter molds is harmful to everyone. The idea, so often embraced by traditionalists, that gender relations only became challenging or perplexing in the modern era, is preposterous. It’s been a subject of interest and speculation for poets, philosophers, playwrights, and politicians for time out of mind, and it’s very modern to feel we need to simply “resolve” the question.
As for your comparison to queens/duchesses, etc… well, no, nobody wants Palin to be a queen. We don’t have queens anymore. In a different political order you have to work out different customs, and in ours women do seem to be less prominent in politics than men, but they still crop up, and are occasionally rather good at what they do. I don’t know whether Palin qualifies or not, but I think Margaret Thatcher, say, did some pretty good things. Was there a single man in all of Britain who could have done as well? Shucks, I don’t know, but it seems like kind of a goofy criterion to apply when you’ve got a good thing going. After all, these kinds of hypotheticals are fairly pointless in a democracy, because in practical terms it really doesn’t matter if there’s somebody somewhere who could do the job, if that person is unknown or unelectable.
“And in a republic the politicians decide how wars are fought. And the president is the commander-in-chief. Do we want our commanders to be people who are constitutionally incapable of fulfilling the role played by the people they command?”
Most politicians are people who would be unfit for soldiering, if only because of their age. Perhaps you could get past this by invoking a more Thomistic notion of “potentiality”, suggesting that at least men who are older or otherwise medically unfit for soldiering are still “potentially” good soldiers in a way that women are not. Even then, though, there’s an argument to be made that the temperament appropriate for a solider is quite different from that appropriate to governing. Plato seems to have thought so. In any case, you would certainly need an argument to show that “would make a good soldier” is a necessary prerequisite for being a good politician.
“First, yes, all things being equal, the more time wives and mothers have to devote to their husbands and their children, the better.”
I don’t know how anything would ever be “equal”, but I don’t think the “maternal attention” curve should be seen as a maximizing function. It is actually possible for a woman to be excessively absorbed in her family, as it’s possible to be excessively absorbed in anything earthly. In the early years when children are small, they can be enormously time-consuming, so we shouldn’t be too critical of young mothers who find little time for anything else. But in the long run it can be quite burdensome on children when their mothers make them “their whole lives.” But, more importantly:
“The implicit argument is not tendentious. The author of the piece goes to church and has a blog and reads and writes and clearly is interested in the greater world. But does that prevent her from being at home with her children every day and every night or from packing her husband’s lunch? No.”
Actually, we don’t know much about that woman, because that particular comment came from further down the thread, but I imagine she probably does at least a few other things besides care for her family. Most people do. However, that doesn’t mean that her argument is not tendentious; it just means that she’s a hypocrite. Or at least not a very clear thinker. Because the suppressed premise in her argument is that term “dedicated” can only be used of a person who is committed to nothing else besides the thing to which she is “dedicated.” That is silly.
On to the argument that it was wrong of Palin to subject her daughter to public disgrace… I still don’t see how that would be any different if it were the father who were running for office. You argue that the father’s vocation requires him to provide for his family, which puts him out in the world. Fine, but that wouldn’t explain why he needed to seek high political office in a way that might expose/embarrass his children. I don’t think there’s anybody for whom the two options in life are 1) running for president, and 2) unemployment. The ramifications on the daughter (in terms of unwanted attention) would be the same in either case, (unless because people tend to be even more nastily inquisitive with respect to the offspring of female politicians than they do with male ones, which I suppose is possible.) But in neither case do I think it clearly obligatory for the parent to retire from public life to save the child from embarrassment. The girl is now eighteen. She’s not a child, and she made her own choices. It isn’t her parents’ job to reorganize their whole lives to accommodate an adult daughter.
But really what this boils down to in my mind is two main points. First, you are simply too determined to break masculinity and femininity into distinct categories with definite rules. Men run the polis and women the home, women can cry and men shouldn’t, there’s “man thumos” and “woman thumos” etc etc etc. There’s some truth to all of these, but the reality is more complicated. These are more tendencies than hard-and-fast rules. Men still have an important role in the home, and women were popping up in important community and social roles long before 1800. Men can cry in some instances (Our Lord did), and women can also be contemptible if they cry too much and at the wrong times. And while there may be some differences between the typical masculine and feminine manifestations of thumos, at the root it’s all thumos, subject to all kinds of shadings but basically the same important ingredient of the human spirit.
You yourself implicitly agree that these tendencies can’t have the status of laws of nature when you admit that there are acceptable exceptions. If it were an absolute law of nature that women shouldn’t be involved in warfare, then Joan of Arc would be a great sinner, but instead she’s a saint. If it were a law of nature that women shouldn’t rule, no Salic Law would make it all right. But in fact, these aren’t laws of nature. They’re tendencies, reflective of some underlying reality, but also subject to a certain amount of flux. So, while it may be insulting to be put perpetually under the exclusive rule of females (though I think we should note again that this is a tyrannical rule, which is clearly an important element of the passage, and an evil in its own right) may be insulting, but it doesn’t follow that women should never hold elected office (or should only do so in cases of absolute desperation.)
The second thing is that women like this aren’t helping anything by being so defensive (and yes, I mean that in a pejorative sense.) As I said before, they seem to feel that they can’t be respected unless all married women follow suit and don’t work. You said before that this was an unwarranted ad hom attack, but actually it seems to me like a main premise in the argument. “I’m just a wife and mother; if Sarah Palin can be respected as a wife and mother AND be a politician, it makes me look bad.”
This just seems petty. Mothers don’t need to apologize to anybody for being at home full time, and it’s unseemly to try to justify themselves with snitty remarks about Sarah Palin’s children. Her political career doesn’t belittle them, and their feeling that it does only reveals their own insecurity. As for social stigmas, trust me – those are unavoidable for a woman regardless of what she does. Whether you work, or don’t work, or have many children, few, or none, there will be some group of people who thinks you’re a disgrace to the female sex. But in fact, different circumstances can call for different courses of action. I know women who work full-time and seem to my best evaluation to be very good (dedicated!) mothers. I know lots of mothers who don’t work (with some happy about this, some less pleased). I know some who work part time, and others who work full-time because they more or less have to, but who would like to stop working if they could. None of these seem to me to be inherently shameful situations, and I can have great respect for women in all of these categories. What does seem unfortunate, though, is speculating about whether Palin’s daughter would or would not have gotten pregnant if her mother hadn’t been in politics, or asking what sacrifices Palin could possibly have made for her children when frankly, you know practically nothing about the Palin family.
I’m a bit confused, John L. Who’s being accused of circular reasoning here? Because I don’t see it in my post, but I can certainly see it in yours. The point to be made is that women can’t be good mothers while working full-time, and you “prove” this by pointing out that Sarah Palin is a mother, that she works, and thus that she isn’t “full-time” mothering. (I guess there’s a suppressed premise here that a person can only have one “full-time” job.) That looks pretty circular.
Sarah Palin may be a negligent mother – I really don’t know. She may not be very smart or very competent or very qualified for office (all of which was asserted in the post, though without substantiation.) Don’t vote for her if you don’t want to. But assuming that she is a bad mother simply because she’s a politician, and even going on to unkind (and basically unsubstantiated) speculations about her private family affairs, just doesn’t seem nice, and certainly isn’t an effective way to argue the case against women in politics.