can i just say that ...

I tire of people saying that John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin was "cynical," that he was trying to pander to women with this choice. Is he really stupid enough to think that women who were going to vote for Hillary Clinton will now vote for Sarah Palin just because she's a woman? they ask.

That would be no. He's not that stupid. Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin are nearly the antithesis of each other. There might be exactly two women in the country who were going to vote for Hillary just because she is a woman who might vote for McCain just because Palin is a woman.

It was not about Palin's being a woman, people, although that's a nice bonus. It was about inspiring those legions among evangelicals who are none too excited about John McCain to actually get out and vote. It's not that evangelicals were going to vote for Obama. It was that they were going to stay home. A Point of View writer captured this nicely last month in The News & Observer:


When Christian conservatives stay homeNews & Observer, The (Raleigh, NC)Editorial/Opinion A9
Thomas Mills Correspondent
Published: August 19, 2008

CARRBORO--Throughout the primary election season, Barack Obama's campaign argued that his nomination would expand the electoral playing field. In particular, they pointed to Southern states, including North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia. Even in states like South Carolina and Mississippi, local political observers have made the case that high African-American turnout could turn their states "blue."
As pollsters, pundits and others make their predictions, African-American turnout has been the focus of arguments and discussions. However, there is another side of the coin. What will turnout be like in the conservative Christian community?
Republican victory in the South has always relied on a substantial get-out-the-vote effort within the evangelical Christian community. This year seems different.
Many of the right rejected John McCain in the primaries, and some swore never to back him. (Remember Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter disparaging the nominee?) Only in the past month have the leaders of the Christian right grudgingly agreed to back McCain -- and still there are holdouts, the most prominent being James Dobson of Focus on the Family.
In addition, a new breed of evangelical leaders, including Rick Warren, has said that it's time to move beyond the social issues that have defined Christian conservatives. Instead, they urge their followers to focus on issues such as global poverty and even environmental concerns. Some in the old guard who stressed morality are either dying off or have lost credibility because of their own moral shortcomings.
The booming Clinton economy of the 1990s allowed the rank-and-file Christian conservatives to focus on issues that had little to do with their daily lives. They voted against choice, against gays, for guns and for prayer in schools. What they got was an ill-planned war, staggering gas prices and a crumbling economy.
This year, many of those voters are likely looking at their pocketbooks, and some may be having buyer's remorse.
I'm not suggesting that large numbers of Christian conservatives are going to rush to the polls to support Obama. And I have the utmost respect for the GOP turnout machinery. However, I am suggesting that this year, voting behavior might be different.
After 20 years of combative politics around social issues, Christian conservatives have made very little progress, and new leaders say it's time to refocus. John McCain has never inspired the community and, until a few weeks ago, was bashed by much of the leadership. Finally, the rank-and-file are predominantly middle- and working-class families who have been hit hard by economic policies promoted by the leaders they helped elect.
I don't think they will come out to vote Barack Obama. I'm just not sure that they will come out at all.
Copyright 2008 by The News & Observer Pub. Co.

Friends for the ages

So, I have this friend. We'll call her Murphy. She was sitting on her porch the other day stringing beans that she had grown in her own garden on her own patch of rural Indiana. This would be unremarkable if it weren't for the fact that, in her childhood, she hadn't known that vegetables actually sprouted from the ground. In the world of her mother, the cook in the home, beans came from cans.

And they occasionally came with pork, as in pork and beans. And in Murphy's house, those pork and beans from the can were served in a big bowl, unheated. Unless they were the pork and beans that came in the form of beanie weenies in a frozen Swanson's aluminum plate. In that case, being able to chew them necessitated a trip to the oven.

Fish came in sticks, also from the freezer. And mashed potatoes came from a box.

So you'll understand why picturing Murphy sitting on a porch stringing and snapping a passle of pods was, for me, hiLARious. How would she know how to string a bean? Well, she married a lovely farm boy, who, she pointed out as I chortled, also consumed cold beans from a can during his childhood. Of course, he was on a tractor at the time. Clearly, if he had been thinking, he would have loaded up his bunson burner on that there tractor and had him some hot beans.

A foster-care quandary

Study targets smoking in foster homes, June 4: Anybody who has ever entered a house inhabited by smokers can sympathize with Jackie Sparks, a 16-year-old in North Carolina's foster-care system. The stale smell that soaks clothing, the secondhand smoke that carries dangers, the money wasted on a deadly addiction. Sparks, who has had to live in several smoking homes, wants the state to ban cigarette-wielding adults from being foster parents. And she has enlisted the help of a state lawmaker.

Rep. Tricia Cotham, a Charlotte Democrat, wisely first asked for a state study to determine whether banning smokers from becoming foster parents would exacerbate an already critical shortage of open homes. It seems like the answer obviously will be yes. But it's hard to overlook the harmful effects of forcing children to live inside a nauseating nicotine haze.

Once again, we shouldn't have to legislate good sense. Why can't adults put children first and, at the very least, smoke outside the house -- and certainly not in closed-in cars? And that goes for all parents, not just foster parents, who smoke.

Shame, shame

Front page, June 4: Catholic teens feel guilt's tug weaken? (Gross generalities to follow:) If you can find a child today, regardless of religious background, who's ever had a case of shame, call the CDC. There might be an outbreak! We've vaccinated our children against shame, so guilt can never grow. There are no bad people, just bad choices. We can't help it! Long live self-esteem.

Of course, the list of things one might consider a "bad choice" today has been pared to paucity in the name of enlightenment. Cheating is just getting ahead. Living together is testing the waters. Buying pornography is every American's right, baby.

It's hard to see how anybody can reach the moral high road without taking a few educational detours into guilt and shame. When there aren't any guardrails to bump against, a trip to the ditch often results.

Beyond distasteful

Though the point that N&O columnist Barry Saunders was trying to make in his June 3 column "Pictures at church troubling" is understandable, his equating pictures of aborted fetuses to cherry cobbler was more than a little sick.

It's hard to know whether displaying such pictures, as a Durham church does, has any value in deterring abortions. That they don't was Saunders' point. An anti-abortion writer of a letter to the editor printed June 4 also took issue with the cobbler quote but asserted that such grotesque pictures serve only to desensitize further our already ho-hum selves. Given the number of violent images we subject ourselves and our children to daily, what's a few more?

It's somewhat ironic, however, that the pictures clearly made Saunders sick, even if it were just enough quease to make cherry cobbler unappetizing. Isn't that the point? To make us uncomfortable with the brutality of abortion?

God's man

Let me direct your attention to an N&O obituary of May 21, to the obituary of Larry Campbell, a man, like David, after God's own heart. This was a man who had nothing much materially in adulthood, a man who began married life as a house parent in a home for abused or orphaned children and who died as the pastor of a small but growing church that he helped start in Middlesex, N.C. He spent his entire life, from the age of 12, in ministry, toiling many years as a counselor, marriage and otherwise, offering his patient guidance, his good humor and his open and humble heart to hundreds of hurt and broken people. Being enveloped within the power of the authentic, moving prayers that poured from Larry's mouth was a healing of its own.

Many are the happy things that could be said about Larry, whose Elvis impersonation was particularly memorable and whose ability to appear somewhat angelic after unleashing the most devious of pranks was legendary. But for the purpose of public thought, one of the many things that struck me during Larry's most perfect of funerals was the question of his lack of financial planning, also legendary. Was this foolishness ... or was it faith? Within a culture that is brushed continuously by a nauseating swirl of rampant materialism lay a man and his family who relied on God to provide, who believed in Jehovah-jireh. I find such faith far more admirable than any amount of fortune.

It's true that there was no money for a funeral, but several churches came together and provided the money. When the true men of faith among us rely on God, God relies on his people to be his hands and feet. Is God finding you reliable?

Sitting among the hundreds of people at Larry's funeral (not to mention standing in line for nearly two hours at the funeral home the night before), you also had to contemplate the power of your own life, to wonder whether you're doing anything that makes a difference to one person, let alone to hundreds.

And you had to wonder why -- why our beloved Larry had to die of a heart attack at age 47, to leave, among scores of others, a 9-year-old son and his first grandchild, due in August.

Three of Larry's favorite praise and worship songs were part of the funeral, and on the last, the attendees were supposed to stand up, raise their hands and sing. One of the pastors pointed out that this was Larry's last laugh, of course, making the staid Baptists among us uncomfortably lift their arms elbow high, hoping no one would see them.

During the second song, however, Larry's wife stood up, alone among hundreds, and lifted her hands to the sky, singing along with "Our God is an Awesome God" -- self abandoned.

If she can leave the whys behind, I reckon I can, too.

Here are the lyrics to the last song. You can see the obituary by clicking on 'God's man.'

"So I'll stand / With arms high and heart abandoned in awe / Of the One who gave it all / Stand / My soul Lord to You surrendered/ All I am is Yours"

Lather v. laser

Triangle Politics on Page 3B of The N&O today includes a conversation between two female officials attending a regional water policy forum. One wants to know how the other manages to take two-minute showers, given the no-small matter of leg-shaving. Durham Mayor Pro Tem Cora Cole-McFadden manages her two-minute power showers because she's had laser treatment on her legs.

If you do the math on that -- three extra shower minutes for shaving (OK, I don't like knicked knees, so maybe four) x seven days x the number of women in the Triangle -- you start to get into some serious weekly water savings if women didn't have to shave their legs.

So when the next drought approaches and we start pretending like we're going to do something about water before it's too late, when we start talking about muncipalities' offering coupons and vouchers for low-flow toilets and dribble shower heads, let's include some laser-treatment vouchers, too.