Candace

Talmadge

Read Candace's bio and previous columns

July 10, 2009

Author: Sarah Palin Embodies Theocratic Movement

A tsunami of speculation followed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s announcement that she is leaving office July 26.

Most of the analysis, however, ignores or downplays the religious extremism behind Palin’s meteoric rise to Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008, and which forms the core of Palin’s own beliefs.

Yet on her Facebook page, Palin refers to “a higher calling” as a major motive for her resignation. Those are code words, and one who has deciphered them is Leah Burton, a fourth-generation Alaska native intimately familiar with the players and the politics of our northernmost state.

Burton is the author of TheoPalinism, an extended political tract in the grand tradition of Swift, Defoe and Paine. With sarcasm and passion, Burton skewers Palin as "the face of failed extremism, referring, in part, to Republican losses in the 2008 and 2006 national elections. Burton also means the havoc and sheer incompetence that characterized Palin’s stints in office in Alaska and that Burton documents throughout TheoPalinism.

Burton writes that Palin is a stalking horse for the most extreme elements of the religious right. She warns that just as the GOP took a pounding in the 1964 presidential election only to emerge victorious four years later, today’s defeated extremists are regrouping to fight more campaigns.

And Palin, anointed like an Old Testament prophetess, aims to lead them into battle.

“Palin has made it clear in her pronouncements that she is not only a ‘commissioner of God,’ but if a ‘door were to open’ and she was given the opportunity to be in power, she would carry out her theocratic mission,” Burton writes. “We must understand this about Palin and her ‘followers’ as we watch her continuing attempts to be elected to the highest office in our country.”

“This is really going to get ugly,” Burton said in an interview about Palin’s leaving office. “Now she has free rein to get people all whipped up. It’s a typical move for a born-again zealot – playing the role of martyr.”

Turning to Palin as an officeholder, Burton paints a most unflattering picture of a vindictive narcissist.  She writes that Palin has been influenced to an unprecedented degree by her husband, Todd, whom Burton labels “unelected, unauthorized and inappropriate.” Around Alaska’s capital, the author reveals, Palin is referred to routinely as “the Stepford governor,” a reference to the film in which wives are replaced in secret by submissive automatons.

One of Burton’s most revealing items: A quote from former Wasilla City Council member Nick Carney. “I’m the mayor. I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can’t.” Carney says that was Palin’s response when he objected to her spending $50,000 to redecorate the mayor’s office after being elected.

Burton also writes that the culture wars (abortion, gay marriage, stem-cell research) are, in reality, distractions. The Christian Dominionists who back candidates like Palin use these issues to keep the public from perceiving their true goal. They aim to take over the United States and turn it into a theocracy based on a version of Christianity every bit as extreme as the twisted Islam behind the Taliban.

Burton begs what she calls “secular Republicans” to take their party back from the religious extremists. “Thirty years of infiltration by the Religious Right into the Republican Party have caused political transformations across America.”

Burton is working on a follow-up, God’s Own Party, a longer, more detailed dissection of how religious extremists have consumed the Republican Party in their quest for control over the entire country.

Anyone who cares about the state of this union should read it, too.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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