Let me start with the obvious negative. Sarah Palin thinks a whole lot more of John McCain than I do. So there’s that.
And let me leave aside (but just for the moment) all the questions about a Christian mother’s roles and responsibilities. We will get to more of that in future posts. The discussion over this issue on this blog and over at my wife’s blog has revealed that we have to talk about these things a whole lot more than we have. Suffice it to say for the present that our attempts to think out loud about how Palin might have changed things for us as voters does not represent a change of mind on marriage and family issues, or indicate some kind of desperate need to vote Republican. The latter first. I have been “throwing my vote away” on third party candidates for quite some time now, and would be quite content to continue on in that way. I had pretty much settled on Baldwin this go round.
On the former point, I believe that this discussion indicates that some folks who think we are backfilling on our previous teaching about role relationships have obviously missed some of the things we wrote about in our books on marriage and family. Perhaps it was easy to miss because it was abstract — and this situation with Sarah Palin is quite concrete. Perhaps in a future post I will assemble some citations from our books to illustrate that. This doesn’t make us right, obviously, but it does mean that if we are wrong, it is not for reasons of pragmatism or expediency. Scripture first, period. Nobody has to talk me into leaving the Republican Party. I did that more than ten and less than twenty years ago. Not once has my conscience bothered me over that, or kept me up at night.
But the basic point to make tonight is this: whatever you think of it, and however you might want to vote as a result of what you think of it, Sarah Palin has dramatically altered the direction of this race. She is funny, smart, attractive, likeable, on domestic issues pretty darn conservative, and it is as plain as can be that the Democrats and the liberal media have played her selection in about as dunderheaded a way as it is possible to play something. Looking forward to the veep debates, I wince when I think about it. Not easy feeling sorry for Joe Biden, but I already do.
Now if I were a sportscaster calling a grand slam during a game, this does not mean that I am rooting for that particular team. I might or might not be. But whether I am or not, the grand slam remains kind of a fact, and the points stay on the board. When this happens, it is understandable that feelings might run high on the field, and perhaps a fight or a scuffle could break out. And one of the coaches might claim that somebody didn’t touch the bag at second, or something like that. But the Democrats have bloggers out there claiming that the batter is disqualified because she bore the secret love child of one of the hot dog vendors ten years ago. If they think that is a winning strategy, then they can certainly keep it up as far as I am concerned.