The Republican Party Does an About Face

You can’t argue with the fact that even ultra-conservatives, in their otherwise unshakeable evangelical certainty, may cause otherwise unshakable Republicans to do an about-face. In the past, they would not have approved of a mother of five, one of whose daughters will soon make her a grandmother, working outside the home; particularly not at such an important job. Home and hearth would have been her lot in past times.

Sarah Palin, who could soon be Vice President of the United States, has produced a breathtaking reversal of that opinion. She’s ambitious, but not well known as a standard bearer for the traditional America of times past. Nonetheless, her supporters are willing to trust her to master a demanding job that even they admit she’ll have to learn from scratch. And this would be in addition to her considerable family responsibilities.

But that’s only one of the radical changes supporters of the Alaskan Wonder Woman have to make. As a born-again Christian and opponent of sex education in schools, Palin has to be somewhat uncomfortable with the fact her 17-year old unmarried daughter is in her fifth month of pregnancy. But Palin manages to magically transform even that into a conservative trump card. Her suddenly numerous fans exult in the pregnancy as proof of what a truly American lifestyle her family leads. That the daughter would never consider an abortion but is instead overjoyed at the prospect of being allowed to marry the father of her child – incidentally the same age as she – propels the majority of “values conservatives” straight into ecstasy.

Whomever recalls one of Palin’s predecessors, Dan Quayle, when he expressed his disgust (much to the delight of the Republican Party) that a television character named Murphy Brown had a child out of wedlock and then followed that by accusing the producers of the show of destroying the entire moral fabric of the nation might get an inkling of how far Republicans have come in the meantime… or perhaps not. To accuse them of working on a strategic defense where there are no other points to be won in these newly fabricated “mommy wars” is tempting, but other than being true it ignores the change of heart undergone by those staunch ideologues who now rave about a “conservative feminist.”

For Sarah Palin, reality doesn’t begin until next year.