Despite my horror over Sarah Palin’s apparent attempts to censor books, I find myself shelving an image that I created for an editorial relating to the Republican strategy for this election. Why? Not because the image is remarkable, but because it is remarkably simplistic.
A few years ago, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek listing of items on the supposed Gay Agenda. At the time, I predicted that the danger in even posting it, was that homophobes with ill intentions would misappropriate it, or use it out of context as a weapon. Organizations like Concerned Women for America. Needless to say, although it took longer than predicted, Concerned Women for America’s Matt Barber and notorious homophobe, Peter Peter LaBarbera from Americans for Truth wrote Unmasking The ‘Gay’ Agenda and Quotes: Hating Jesus, and Selfishness Redefined respectively. Presenting my satire as a candid assessment, and me as a hateful, dangerous homofascist persecutor.
But there is too much at stake in this election for me to publish an easy to replicate graphic that could be shared easily, and most certainly could and would be taken out of context. So I will wait. And bite my tongue and postpone my criticism for some of the organizations that fail to anticipate how font, placement, positioning and subliminal association need to be factored into thinking before mass distribution of a message, image or graphic.
So instead, I present a childish, irrelevant distraction, lest anyone ponder the above paragraph too much. Doesn’t Sarah Palin look remarkably like Andrea Yates? Remember that small town values, religious mother from good old Texas? They both had five children. Well Palin still does, and Alaskans have been ordered to pray for her eldest son, Track – about to be shipped off to do God’s work in Iraq -- so he should be fine. Yates believes God told her to drown all her children, so she did. Was this Track’s choice? Or did God tell Palin to sacrifice Track, the same way her daughter Bristol sacrificed her childhood?
Palin’s church, The Wasilla Bible Church, supposedly less extreme than her previous Assemblies of God venue of prayer, is currently promoting an upcoming Focus on the Family conference in Anchorage to “cure homosexuality” or pray the gay away, likely to be about as effective as her abstinence only sex education was in preventing Bristol from getting knocked up.
Vote.
