I am Sarah Palin and that is why I don’t like her.

I can see myself wielding my fecundity against other conservative women as a sort of morality trump card (I am clearly more Christian/more moral/more family-oriented/etc COS I GOTZ FIVE KIDS BIATCH!). I can see myself finding out the hard way that while I was pretty good looking (enough to win or place well in beauty pageants), I wasn’t hot enough for television– but I would always be the hottest gal in the room if I went into politics. I can see myself telling lies and being rude because ‘it’s just politics’ and still feeling smug and secure in my Christian-culture (though perhaps not necessarily Christian) faith.

I can see myself being offered the bargain Satan offered Jesus, that rule of earthly kingdoms could be assured if I would but bow down to Satan. I can see myself getting so distracted by how I’d delegate authority, and what projects I’d have my kingdom working on, and how I’d make others do what I said that I ended up accepting the bargain without any deeper thought.

We often dislike most people who reflect temptations we aren’t conscious of being susceptible to. And so I dislike her because I think she took the devil’s deal and in taking it revealed to me that I might as easily have done too, in her position and situation.

Her deceit has forced me to be more honest about my motivations when taking on leadership positions and roles and confront my temptation to be power-seeking and vainglorious. God’s work is mysterious, indeed.

Sometimes a picture is worth 100000 words.

This image, from the Field posting about Ms. Palin, is worth a hundred times the usual thousand words, especially in light of the way evangelicals rushed to view a white lady and her kid as image-bearers of God when they could not do the same for others of less pale and middle class persuasion.

I’m a Christian. By some standards my views place me in right-wing evangelical territory. It is a source of chronic and deep pain that these right-wing evangelicals do worse than look at me and mine as animals– they literally will not even acknowledge us as part of God’s creation. This is a far crueller consequence of racism, because it places us completely beyond any hope of redemption or acknowledgement.

And that is why for me, the treatment of Sarah Palin’s daughter and her daughter’s bastard remains important, and why I use the word that only gets pulled out by white evangelicals when referring to brown and black and poor babies of unwed mothers. I am glad that so many evangelicals are rushing to shower them with lovingkindness. Now I want to see them do that for the WOC in similar straits, or the poor white women who aren’t comfortably middle-class.

As Field’s picture illustrates, I’m being smacked in the face by some of the same people I go to church with regarding sin and its consequences. Jesus got pretty irritated with Pharisees, and in this regard, I am as well. I am so tired of Christian-culture being used to further white supremacist messages when Christ was not even a white man at all by modern American standards.

I hope things work out for the family, but I also hope that these uber-religious folk open their hearts for people who don’t look just like them as well. Which may be a vain hope– I hope otherwise of course.