David Talbot writes in Salon today about his interview with Rev. Howard Bess, a Baptist Minister in Palmer, Alaska, and the author of Pastor, I am Gay, one of the books in the book banning controversy surrounding former Mayor Sarah Palin and the Wasilla Library. Talbot also reveals that Palin has been involved in street protests attempting to prevent women from their legal rights to obtain an abortion in Alaska.
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.
At one point during the hospital battle, passions ran so hot that local antiabortion activists organized a boisterous picket line outside Dr. Lemagie's office, in an unassuming professional building across from Palmer's Little League field. According to Bess and another community activist, among the protesters trying to disrupt the physician's practice that day was Sarah Palin.
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.'"
Bess is unnerved by the prospect of Palin -- a woman whose mind is given to dogmatic certitude -- standing one step away from the Oval Office. "It's truly frightening that someone like Sarah has risen to the national level," Bess said. "Like all religious fundamentalists -- Christian, Jewish, Muslim -- she is a dualist. They view life as an ongoing struggle to the finish between good and evil.
Palin's involvement in street level protests runs counter to her "respect for people with different opinions" on abortion and her desire to "reach out and work with people from the other side" of the abortion issue as she told Charlie Gibson in her recent interview with him.
It's not that abortion is the most important issue in this election for women, or anyone else, but her involvement in these street level protests does speak to a certain mindset she would bring to Washington. This latest news does coincide with the McCain campaign's tactics lately, with an all out return to the Culture War which seeks to divide communities and the nation, rather than finding common ground that truly respects differing views on controversial issues, allowing government to focus less on the private and personal matters of people's lives, and more the the economy, health care, education, infrastructure, and the business of government.
The Wonk Room also has a great take on this, weaving together many aspects of this still developing story.
