‘A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn’t worth a warm bucket of spit.’

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented
an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling but on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly
traditional and gung-ho futurist.

Now that’s the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-xcuses, moose-hunting feminism — a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.
…To automatically assume that she is a religious fanatic who has embraced the
most extreme ideas of her local church is exactly the kind of careless reasoning that has been unjustly applied to Barack Obama, whom the right wing is still trying to
tar with the fulminating anti-American sermons of his longtime preacher, Jeremiah
Wright. The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately eveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past ecade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic deology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did
Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized,
with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral
absolutes.

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the termination of the powerless by the powerful. It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism — one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.