There is an article in today’s Salon called “The pastor who clashed with Palin” By David Talbot which concerns itself with Sarah Palin’s religious fundamentalism as it relates to government.
The primary focus of the article is the interactions between Palin and Howard Bess, a retired Baptist preacher from Wasilla’s nearby neighbor town Palmer, Alaska. Bess, the author of a book entitled “Pastor, I am gay,” originally came into conflict with Palin over book banning, and eventually on other social issues as well.
One issue was abortion. This from the article:
Soon after the book controversy, Bess found himself again at odds with Palin and her fellow evangelicals. In 1996, evangelical churches mounted a vigorous campaign to take over the local hospital’s community board and ban abortion from the valley. When they succeeded, Bess and Dr. Susan Lemagie, a Palmer OB-GYN, fought back, filing suit on behalf of a local woman who had been forced to travel to Seattle for an abortion. The case was finally decided by the Alaska Supreme Court, which ruled that the hospital must provide valley women with the abortion option.
The thing that shook me up the most in the article was a quote from another local progressive that raises the issue of Palin’s knowledge, beliefs and clear danger if she were to become president:
Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’
“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”
Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'”
And this from Bess:
Forget all this chatter about whether or not she knows what the Bush doctrine is. That’s trivial. The real disturbing thing about Sarah is her mind-set. It’s her underlying belief system that will influence how she responds in an international crisis, if she’s ever in that position, and has the full might of the U.S. military in her hands. She gave some indication of that thinking in her ABC interview, when she suggested how willing she would be to go to war with Russia.
It is the clear danger of extreme religious views combined with the age and health history of John McCain that should make all voters review the potential of a radical creationist with a finger on the nuclear (noo-clee-ar) button.
