On Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin.

I don't think one name has bothered me so much in recent memory. If McCain & Palin would have won, all hope for America would have been lost. We would be one John McCain stroke away from having the most inept President of all-time.

The ideas that she epitomizes. The people that she represents. It makes me want to throw up in my mouth. Where do I start? While we have different views on many topics, I will focus on her views on creationism in science classrooms, abortion in cases of rape, and global warming. Other sources of contention are her views about gay marriage and her support of a referendum to deny same-sex couples state health benefits and her views on capital punishment.

1. Palin supports teaching both evolution and creationism in science classrooms.

• Creationism has no place in a science classroom. People have cleverly repackaged it as "intelligent design", but they cannot fool me. According to this article, Palin says intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in order to give students more information since evolution is only a theory.

• "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

• Everything she says sounds good in theory, but it is monumentally flawed. You cannot teach science based on the proposition that there is a creator. The fundamentals of science are based on the Scientific Method; making an hypothesis, experimentation, analysis, etc. However, with intelligent design or creationism or whatever you want to call it, the fundamentals of science fade away. For example, if someone finds a sufficiently complex organism that cannot be fully explained, then a person who relies on intelligent design can only attribute this organism to the design of God. All the analysis and experimentation of complex organisms goes away. Thus, science fades away and molds itself into another part of religion. However, as we have known throughout history, when man finds problems that cannot be initially solved, lots of the people work on to figure it out. As more and more people perform their own experiments, they make more and more progress toward finding a greater truth. If the U.S. were to implement her ideas about science, it would only cloud the minds of the young science students of our country and lead us to take another step back as a nation. We are already behind other countries in our science and math aptitude. The U.S. can't be a superpower if our students believe that God "designed" everything when we clearly have a better explanation of the development of our universe -- evolution.
  

2. Palin is against abortion in cases of rape.

• Why should a woman who has been raped have to keep this unplanned child in her life? Learning about this issue in a Contemporary Moral Problems class in college really helped me see that abortion in cases of rape is morally permissable. Judith Thompson created the "Violinist" analogy to show the flaws in anti-abortion arguments. It goes something like this:

• A third party kidnaps you and you wake up attached to a famous violinist. You are told that detaching yourself would kill him, as he is using your kidneys to stay alive. Thomson argues that you are free to detach yourself on the grounds that the violinist has no right to the use of your body. The logic follows that if you agree with this analogy, then you agree with abortion in cases of rape.

• To me this analogy is a perfect parallel of the situation when a woman is raped and becomes pregnant. She has the life of another being in her hands, but due to the circumstances, I believe that she is under no obligation to keep this being alive. Thus, I believe that Palin's view on abortion in cases of rape is flawed and infringes on the rights of women.
  

3. Palin is not sure about global warming.

"I'm not one though who would attribute [global warming] to being man-made."

• Right as she was being nominated, Palin most clearly voiced her opinion that global warming is not a man-made problem. This quote generated a lot of controversy, so she later softened her stance and remarked:
  

• "I believe that man's activities certainly can be contributing to the issue of global warming, climate change. Here in Alaska, the only arctic state in our Union, of course, we see the effects of climate change more so than any other area with ice pack melting. Regardless though of the reason for climate change, whether it's entirely, wholly caused by man's activities or is part of the cyclical nature of our planet -- the warming and the cooling trends -- regardless of that, John McCain and I agree that we gotta do something about it and we have to make sure that we're doing all we can to cut down on pollution."

• Here's the thing...since she believes that global warming is NOT man-made, then any effort to cut down on pollution will have NO effect. Thus, cutting down on emissions would be a big waste of everyone's time. She only changed her mind because she's one of the only whack jobs in Washington who still questions the causes of global warming. Maybe she hasn't seen An Inconvenient Truth. Or maybe she got some bad science teaching in her state of Alaska. Since we already know that she is not quite sure about evolution, who knows what people are being taught there. To me, it is quite appalling that in 2008 a person like Sarah Palin, someone who people look toward for leadership in this nation, still has such outdated beliefs.