Sarah Palin is not a woman

Most "Divinity" schools now make a mockery of the term. They are filled with "critical theory" proponents openly hostile to faith and more interested in foisting their Marxist interpretations of reality on impressionable minds.

This esteemed academic is no different -- in her poor postmodern deconstructed brain, up is down, in is out, hot is cold, and a person who is (obviously!) a woman is in fact a man.

Pray for her. That's all you can do.

Having attended an elite Divinity school like Chicago, I can tell you that Houghton is exactly right.

With some exceptions, of course, there are no more clueless and out of touch people in the whole world than professors at divinity schools or seminaries (those that are supported by university endowments and not the free-will contributions of local churches.) They have no accountability to any particular faith community because their funding is assured, and thus they live in a universalist fantasy world spun by the excrescence of their ideologies.

Wendy Doniger's sexless, history-less, faith-less women, so few in number, can take to their computers all they want, while the polls show the overwhelming support of working class women for Palin. One reason I like Camille Paglia is that even though she is a lesbian, atheist, liberal academic, she at least has the imagination and honesty to see that the whole world is not like her. She readily identifies Palin's appeal, and knows that because of professional idiots like Doniger, it is only going to increase.

"Ain't I a woman?"

I don't mean this as an insult, just an observation: those glasses make Doniger look like Elton John circa "Benny and the Jets."

Daniel,

I take your point, but I think it's somewhat misguided. There is no need to have an argument about this. You don't have to defend her. She is a silly academic with silly notions. It's funny! Why not simply take it as something to lighten the mood on an otherwise somber day. Let's all join in and have a good chuckle at this woman's delusions.

But if you want to have a serious discussion about it, here's another way of looking at it: What better day to talk about the profoundly deleterious effect the kind of thinking this woman represents has had on our national discourse as it relates to events like 9/11?

When an academic engages in Orwellian doublespeak to insist that Sarah Palin is not a woman, it's just pure sophistry of the lowest and most absurd variety. Surely we can agree about that?

And that's the same sort of thinking that made people like Susan Sontag uncomfortable with calling the actions of the terrorists on 9/11 evil (although she was entirely comfortable with calling "the white race" the "cancer of human history").

It is entirely appropriate on this very day to ask whether such thinking deserve grants, philanthropy and the academic support of what are supposed to be our finest institutions -- or whether it deserves reprobation and derision and rejection.

Rod asked earlier about the effect of 9/11 in our own lives. My daughter was two months away from being born, and my wife went into pre-term labor that day. We spent 9/11 in the hospital, and then she spent the next three months on strict bedrest.

You can imagine what it was like thinking about bringing a baby into this world right after 9/11. After we returned from the hospital a few days later, I was a ball of fiery nerves. While my wife slept, I took long walks around the park near our house, stewing in righteous anger about what these 19 evil men had done to my country, worrying about my unborn child, agonizing about what lay ahead.

Every time an airliner passed overhead, I flinched. In the days that followed, I marveled that there were actually people who couldn't understand the profound evil of what Al Qaeda had wrought.

Screenwriting guru Robert McKee has written that, "true character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure -- the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature."

9/11 caused this essential process to happen, and it was an amazing an eye-opener for Americans. I remember a week or so after 9/11 we had some liberal friends over for dinner. Our TV was on and they were playing a clip of Bush standing in the Oval Office talking to reporters with tears shining brightly in his eyes. I began to choke up, and our friends scoffed. I knew then that our friendship with them couldn't last and wouldn't stand.

As I watched and marveled at the deeply flawed thinking that could allow a person to be blind to the evil of 9/11, I became more profoundly conservative in my thinking as the months passed.

While in the hospital with my wife on 9/11, I kept walking by a verse stamped on the hallway wall near our room in the maternity ward from Psalm 139, "For you created my inmost being/you knit me together in my mother's womb/I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made/your works are wonderful/I know that full well."

It was on the third or fourth time I passed that verse on the wall that I began to question all of my atheist assumptions about life. I made a distinct mind shift, and moved from being an atheist into the agnostic camp with theistic leanings on that very day (actual theism and then Christianity came much later).

Seeing evil wrought on my nation by fiendish murderers, being faced with the distinct possibility of losing my baby, worrying about my wife's condition, contemplating the lives of the innocents taken from us -- all on the same day -- this forced a winnowing process. I could have been driven more solidly into the secularist camp. I went the other way.

And I think 9/11 forced a winnowing process in this country for many people. It divided between those who thought there was real evil in the world, and those who didn't.

Whatever else you want to argue about 9/11 and the reality it revealed and how it was handled in the aftermath, it's difficult to argue this high altitude fact: like it or not, we face people who really do wish to destroy our civilization. They represent an existential threat. If they can acquire a nuclear weapon and use it, they will. The chances of them acquiring it remain very high - as even Bush critics like Ron Suskind have written. This isn't a liberal or conservative thing, it's just a fact. We're faced with 50-50 odds that in the next decade or so, Al Qaeda or an ancillary group will find a way to nuke a major American city.

The way we respond to that existential threat reveals who we are. Some of us thrash about and get lost in the weeds. Some of us insist that we keep this essential fact of the very real existential threat at the forefront of our minds.

It strikes me that a similar winnowing process is occurring across America with the Palin phenomenon, not as intense obviously, but still profound. We've been able to see the mask ripped away, the pretenses of the Left stripped away, and their true thought processes and emotions revealed. It's not a pretty sight.

Houghton: "it divided between those who thought there was real evil in the world and those who didn't."

Mmmmmm... Your sentiment I grasp and hold fervently. But it is inaccurate. It changed who people thought were the real evil in the world. On 9-12-01, real evil in the world were terrorists, tyrants, dictators, and murdering madmen.

On 9-11-08, the same people now believe it is G W Bush, Sarah Palin, and Christians who believe in God and have the evil and malevolence to vote GOP. And the tyrants are just "victims of our evil plans".

Not even Rod continues to think it worthy to win against the madmen.

Proud American,

You are being deliberately intellectually dishonest. We all read her post. We all know what it says. We all know what she means. She is the worst sort of academic sophist using Orwellian doublespeak to push her deranged views on the public.

Shame on you.

Proud American: "You can't possibly be suggesting that Doniger said Palin isn't a woman, can you?...I have never been under the impression that God wants us to lie or cheat or deceive each other. Maybe you know something about God that I don't."

Proud *American*: if you'd stop bathing in your own self-righteousness for one moment, you'd actually be able to read what the author says.

From the article: "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

As for this so-called academic, why we even labor under the slightest pretense that this old haag has anything useful to say is baffling.

This is what I never understand about the feminist movement. They at times are right to rebel against male oppression and objectification of women, but what they do is also reject what is quitessentially womanly (i.e. motherhood) and try and turn all women into men, i.e. childless career chasing, power hungry men at that. I would say Palin is ultra womanly (5 kids, wow, what man can bear 5 kids?), and that most career hungry feminists are really wannabe men. In short, this professor accusing Palin of not being a woman actually can't see past the huge log stuck in her eye.

A theory:

Wendy Doniger has gotten a little too full of herself, and has constructed a template (model? mold?, image?), or perhaps more accurately a stereotype, a fully fleshed out 3D image of what a "woman" is, and those who fail to conform... Are not women.

All the women I know think they're women. Not a one of them is a clone of another. I'm a man, and yet, not another man I know is a clone of me.

If I were to regard all who were not my clones, nor follow my template to not be men, my arrogance would be incalculable.

Perhaps that's an adequate theory for Wendy Doniger.

"But she has a point. My wife points out that Palin doesn't agree with her on all most every issue that she has labeled "woman's issues"."

Perhaps you wife is wrong to flatter herself into thinking she can define "woman's issues" for everyone.

This woman is "teaching" our spiritual leaders of tomorrow.

Actually, I don't think she is. My guess -- and it's only a guess -- is that the kind of spirituality she professes is dead on arrival. There will be few takers. As goes the Episcopal Church and the liberal Prot mainline, so goes the Donigerism.

If Sarah Palin isn't a woman, then there sure isn't any hope for me. Though my husband may disagree.

Houghton - Thank you for taking the time to share your experience of September 11th and its aftermath. It was very thoughtful and moving.

All I could hear, upon reading the title of this blog post, was Austin Powers saying, "That ain't no woman! It's a man, man!"

In an age in which no one knows what marriage is, why is Prof. Doniger so sure that she knows what a woman is?

Just askin'

Houghton, the "Sarah Palin isn't a woman" rhetoric is of a kind that existed long before 9/11. She's not a woman because she doesn't live *as a victim.* (Some might say that she is doubly a "victim" because her consciousness hasn't been raised.) IOW a "real woman" is one with the "right consciousness;" one which has been animated by the analysis of feminism.

Understanding and assimilating feminist theory is what makes you a "real woman." Otherwise, you're just a human being with girly bits. The argument has been around at least since the late 60s, early 70s.

To be fair, I think that this Doniger person is actaully, in a roundabout sort of way, trying to make a valid point. Just as there is a difference between a lady and a woman, there is also a difference between a woman and a female. Any creature with a womb (or any electrical device with a specific type of receptacle, such as with USB devices) is female. It is the actions of that being that determine whether or not that female is a woman. Similarly, it is the mannerisms, poise, dignity, grace, etc. that determines whether or not a female also can take or be given the appelation of lady.

From what I've seen Palin most certainly is female. But her actions, comments, etc. remove her from either the category of lady (which I suspect she would not accept anyway) or woman (which her actions prove to not to be, in my opinion). Before anyone dares to accuse me of sexism, I'm not talking about her working life, or anything like that. The fact that she referred to herself as a lipstick bearing canine, and acts like it is what I'm talking about. A woman acts in a way no male or plain female can imitate, holding power without being the least bit aggressive or assertive, being strong without being overbearing, etc. I know several women who fit this model and who would be excellent ina leadership position. I'd vote for them anyday. Terri McCormick (unsuccessfully ran against unethical pretty boy John Gard, who was beat by Steve Kagen), if she were running in my district. The head of my particular Buddhist order, were she American, would get my vote. Even my own mother would earn my vote. These WOMEN would earn my vote AS WOMEN. Not as pitbulls in lipstick.

This was what did it for me against Clinton, and why I haven't signed on to the Palin bandwagon. She called herself a woman and then proceded to act like a man to gain power. In the end, a dude with T 'N' A is still just a dude.

Lordy, the culture war trolls are out in force today, and it is ugly!

Slight addendum to this, David J. White.

Our friendship didn't end over politics.

It ended over their being incapable of taking seriously one of the greatest tragedies ever to befall this nation.