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I will admit my bias at the outset. I speak as one who was formed far enough short of perfect to attract attention upon entering even a large room.
Probably for that reason, when I sort through the feverish Left’s obsessive daily heart attacks over Sarah, the most offensive has been:
How dare she give birth— knowingly — to a Down Syndrome child.
The quivering hubris of whole groups of people on the left taking up this remarkably insensitive, invasive refrain for 14 straight days has been stunning.
Unworthy of Left Wing Respect
On television and in print, the Left has demanded of Sarah, “How can you expect decent people to respect you when you purposely bring a socially, culturally unacceptable child into the world?”
If you are the mother, besides humiliated, how do you feel? How do you answer?
Morally and ethically, it is perfectly proper to disapprove of the Palins’ religion-based decision to carry their now 5-month-old Down Syndrome son to term.
But to publicly pillory Sarah for this intensely personal decision is egregiously vulgar.
When I was born, my parents, but especially Mom, heard the gasping whispers, and when my brother was born, the volume was turned up. But that was a more civilized moment in America when discretion was a shared value. In our close-knit community, even the most overt whispers were muffled, not intended to be heard by the offending family.
And now we have a prominent Canadian doctor, Dr. Andre Lalonde, the executive vice president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Ottawa, who frets, seriously, that the Palin family decision will cut into the number of abortions Canadian doctors perform.
Insult Rooted in (Non) Religious Beliefs
I would expect to hear that remark if I were slinking down an alley in an undesirable neighborhood at midnight.
But not from a doctor willing to throw his reputation into a trash can, like a broken dollbaby, because he met a woman who disagreed with him politically.
Sarah’s overt religiosity galls the predominantly anti-religious Left.
The Left teaches that one’s religion is so private it only should be practiced out of communal view. Any trace of religiosity in the public thoroughfare constitutes an invasion of the Left’s privacy. This is taken directly from the Calculated Catechism of Non-Believers.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Lalonde said that “his primary concern is that women have the…choice of abortion, and that greater public awareness of women making choices like Palin to complete a pregnancy and give birth to their genetically-abnormal baby could be detrimental and confusing to the women and their families.”
Whenever a well-known person gives birth to a non-perfect child, says the doctor, this “could be detrimental and confusing” to ladies pondering whether to have an abortion.
Difference Between Boys and Grownups
I must pause and recapture my breath.
These incendiary comments, essentially, are being made to Sarah’s face, intended to shame her into an apology.
I heard similar calls when I was in school, but they came from schoolboys, early to mid-teens, not ostensibly mature adults. One boy, in particular, used to make fun of my shoes. I remember his words years later, but this was kid stuff.
Had these boys’ remarks been trumpeted over a microphone in my hometown, I probably would be scarred.
The obscenity in the present case is that important, accomplished personages are standing up, intentionally, where they can be seen and emulated, telling Sarah that she is an embarrassment to decent people for purposely cluttering the Left’s virginal gene pool with a malformed child.
Who Is Being Selfish?
Discretion is dead. The only objectives of the How Dare You insults are to imprint hurt, to imprint mortification on this dreadful woman for embarrassing their society by selfishly giving birth to her dreadful, ugly, useless child.
I have been mortified. The feeling is not easily washed away.
For the last 35 years, partisans have preached that abortion is a necessary alternative for women in distress, not the goal.
But to openly, proudly confront — not merely challenge — the mother of an untraditionally formed child, whether internally or externally, is an insult that resists redemption.
You cannot un-humiliate a person any more than you can un-ring a bell.
