Sarah Palin Shattered the Glass Ceiling on 9/3/08

Until the day I die, I will remember a sprint relay race I saw in Laredo, Texas, when I was just 10-years old. In the small schools division, Lampasas High School trailed badly after 3 legs. The batons were handed to the anchors. Ten seconds later – I don’t doubt but that it might have been 9 seconds later – other runners crossed the finish line far behind Lampasas High’s Johnny Jones. My brother, my dad and I knew that we had just seen greased lightning. But, no human being alive, much less a high school kid from Lampasas, Texas, could run as fast as we just saw Johnny Jones run. It had to be an illusion. He must be fast, but those other small school runners must have been really slow.

Two months later, in a larger venue in Montreal, Quebec, 18-year old Johnny Jones won an Olympic gold medal as a member of the United States sprint relay team. A few months after that, he ran a world record time that would have stood untouched for the next 15 years, but for a glitch in the official timing system. We had seen greased lightning in Laredo, Texas.

Last night I saw greased lightning in St. Paul, Minnesota. I will remember that powerhouse speech as long as I live. With her first “hello,” Sarah Palin transformed the highest stakes, hardest fought contest in the world. But, I think something even bigger happened last night. The glass ceiling shattered.

At times, the vanguard of a movement stands in the way of the movement. With a fundamentally misogynistic perspective, Womyn’s rights groups lately have been guarding the glass ceiling. Listen to the vile contempt Sarah Palin faces from them. The elitist, yapping class derisively tells Sarah Palin that she belongs in the kitchen, that she – and all women like her – have no business trying to perform in this man’s world. Without apology or equivocation, the professional womyn’s movement broadcasts that most women (all non-liberal women) are to be held in contempt as dull, backwards creatures. Sarah Palin, as seems to be her way, just cut straight through that nonsense. She questioned whether it should be a man’s world and answered her own question with an emphatic, but distinctly feminine, “No.”

Sen. Obama apparently commented today, “I assume that she wants to be treated the same way that guys want to be treated.” Wrong. That’s the pre-Palin, misogynistic view that it is a man’s world – with female participants and female fellow travelers. It is the view that a woman must choose between the sidelines of the man’s world or forfeit something to enter the man’s world and, then, be treated like a man. Sarah Palin made the solid case that women are not guests or pretenders in a man’s world. Sarah Palin has changed the rules. She is a woman, she doesn’t need anyone else’s permission or approval for her choices, and everyone else had better deal with it. She expects to be treated like a woman. Liberals’ confusion comes from their belief that “woman” is synonymous with inferior, less capable and victim.

UPDATE: This, as the article describes, is the woman that womyn are saying is not qualified. Please, someone tell me anything that Sen. Obama has ever done in office to compare with it. You simply can't.