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["Lynn Wigglesworth" <lynnw1366 AT hotmail.com>]

A good article in The Nation. The author, Katha Pollitt isn't a big fan of 
Palin, but the article is more about the changes that Palin forced on the 
Republican party. She's a real person, with real family problems, and if 
they wanted to support her, they had to accept that.

> From the article:
Palin's presence on the Republican ticket forced family-values conservatives 
to give public support to working mothers, equal marriages, pregnant teens 
and their much-maligned parents. Talk-show frothers, Christian zealots and 
professional antifeminists--Rush Limbaugh and Phyllis Schlafly--insisted 
that a mother of five, including a "special-needs" newborn, could perfectly 
well manage governing a state (a really big state, as we were frequently 
reminded), while simultaneously running for veep and, who knows, 
field-dressing a moose. No one said she belonged at home. No one said she 
was neglecting her husband or failing to be appropriately submissive to him. 
No one blamed her for 17-year-old Bristol's out-of-wedlock pregnancy or 
hard-partying high-school-dropout boyfriend. No one even wondered out loud 
why Bristol wasn't getting married before the baby arrived. All these things 
have officially morphed from sins to "challenges," just part of normal 
family life. No matter how strategic this newfound broadmindedness is, it 
will not be easy to row away from it. Thanks to Sarah, ladies, we can do 
just about anything we want as long as we don't have an abortion.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081124/pollitt

Lynn Wigglesworth