A Vote for Sarah Palin

A Vote for Sarah Palin
By Suann Therese Maier
http://www.firstthings.com/
September 3, 2008

Three memories have shaped my approach to this year’s general election.

Here’s the first. In the late 1970s, during a two-year break from teaching to raise our second son, an adopted child, I found myself at a Los Angeles dinner party filled with DINKs, the “double income, no kids” crowd who were just emerging as a self-aware and upwardly mobile social group. I fell to talking—or more accurately, listening—to a chatty young female attorney who said she was putting in eighty hours a week as a junior associate on a variety of important cases.

After twenty minutes or so, she finally noticed my silence and asked me what I did with my own time. So I told her. I told her about the young couple that had asked my husband and me to adopt their baby if we covered their hospital expenses. I told her about waiting outside the delivery room for our son to be born. I told her about the bureaucratic maze that came with finalizing the adoption of a newborn. I told her about borrowing money from friends so we’d look more solvent than we actually were to Social Service inspectors who checked our accounts.
“That’s wonderful dear,” she said. “You’re so lucky not to have a real job.”

Here’s the second memory. I remember my fourth child, our son Dan, being born one winter evening, purple and struggling for breath. I remember my husband pouring water over his head as we baptized him in my arms. I remember the young Filipina doctor rushing Dan to intensive care. I remember the ten days of his fighting for life. And I remember Dan’s diagnosis, when it finally came in: Down syndrome.

Here’s the third memory. I remember my father, a successful young Chicago attorney, telling me why the Democratic party was the party of “our people,” and why so many Catholics were Democrats, and why the party stood for the little guy, the poor and the defenseless. I remember listening as a young girl in our kitchen as Saul Alinsky organized my parents’ Catholic friends on racial and economic issues in our Chicago living room. And I remember the night in 1992 when Pennsylvania’s governor, Robert Casey, was denied a chance to talk against abortion at the Democratic national convention.

As I draw on those memories now, I reach certain conclusions. As a woman, mother, wife, and lifetime professional educator, I will vote, enthusiastically, for Sarah Palin as vice president this November. Even if the media pressure forces her from the ticket, I will vote against the Democratic party—partly because I respect John McCain and believe him to be the better candidate, but equally because I’m tired of the intransigence and condescension of the Democratic leadership on the abortion issue.

To read the entire essay click the link provided...
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1161

Suann Therese Maier, the mother of four and former director of non-profit support organizations for pregnant women and children with disabilities, is a teacher in Colorado.