As an extreme right-wing conservative pentecostal, one can only imagine what kind of reforms she would push for as Vice President or President. While some are apt to say that she never attempted to legislate her personal beliefs, there are counter arguments.
Found in a couple recent Salon.com articles, there are raised some serious questions on action taken by Sarah Palin as a private citizen and as a leader in her community. We know that she has lied and exaggerated about her record numerous times. What is she covering up?
According to David Talbot, an American Baptist pastor with whom Palin has clashed with personally before wrote one of the books she allegedly was attempting to ban from the library in Wasilla. Reverend Howard Bess wrote a book titled Pastor, I am Gay which addressed his challenges with ministering to a confessed homosexual. The solution he ended at was one reflective of the message of Jesus Christ to love all equally and condemn none.
I can only imagine that this message, lost on many self-identified Christians in America, was too dangerous to the organization with whom Sarah Palin was affiliated. As mayor, there is speculation that she intended on having books banned, Bess' being one of them.
Regarding abortion:
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.How about creationism in science classrooms?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.'Bess' major point is thus:"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."
"Forget all this chatter about whether or not she knows what the Bush doctrine is. That's trivial. The real disturbing thing about Sarah is her mind-set. It's her underlying belief system that will influence how she responds in an international crisis, if she's ever in that position, and has the full might of the U.S. military in her hands. She gave some indication of that thinking in her ABC interview, when she suggested how willing she would be to go to war with Russia.If you would like to read more about some of the beliefs in which Sarah Palin might be fully engrossed then look no further than Sarah Posner's piece. She states:
Based on her public statements, Palin's views appear to be in line with the Assemblies of God official positions on abortion, creationism and homosexuality.Terrifying, simply terrifying...