'Lord ... you are using the wonderful Governor Palin to get your message of the gospel across'

The Guardian (UK) visits Palin's church and provides lots of other background in this very long roundup of the situation from an international view.

Source: The Guardian

... In Palin's case, the improbable journey began here: a sprawling wooden compound that looks like a cross between an oversized McDonald's and a prison complex. It occupies a patch of barren ground on the edge of Wasilla, the tiny town in Alaska in which she spent her childhood and cut her political teeth. Above the entrance a banner announces that this is the home of the Wasilla Assembly of God, motto: "To know Him, and to make Him known!"

It was here Palin was baptised, or "saved", as she describes it, and later had her children baptised. It was here she was inducted into the peculiar rituals of her fundamentalist faith - the charismatic preaching, the laying on of hands, the tears and cries of joy of the Pentecostal church. "I grew up in the Wasilla Assembly of God," she once said. "Nothing freaks me out about the worship service."

On the night I visit the church, the congregation is huddled in a group, arms raised or clasped around each other, as the senior pastor, Ed Kalnins, leads them in prayer. "Lord, we know that you have made this church a platform," he exclaims. "You are using the wonderful Governor Palin to get your message of the gospel across."

... Her trajectory has run in parallel with that of her party. Her career took off precisely at the moment when the Christian right seized control of the Republican movement, casting out the fiscal conservatives who had traditionally held sway with their focus on such worldly matters as low taxes and small government.

The shift in the party's focus from mammon to God is illustrated perfectly in Palin's successful campaign to become mayor in 1996. All previous elections had revolved around such existential questions as how to improve the pavements and get litter off the streets. She ignored all that, campaigning instead against abortion and gun control and casting aspersions on her (Republican) opponent about his infrequent attendance of church.

...Most poignantly, she will not countenance sex education for teenagers, preferring instead to preach that abstinence is the only complete protection against pregnancy or venereal disease. It would be a cheap shot to suggest that this week's bombshell revelation that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is herself pregnant was Palin's comeuppance.

But it would not be unfair to point out that Alaska has the highest per capita incidence of chlamydia in the country, and that the rate of teenage pregnancies across the US, including within her state, has just risen for the first time in 14 years - a trend many blame on George Bush's preferment of abstinence-only education.

... This may not be the most persuasive foreign policy qualification in presidential history, but if Palin had to face Putin in a shoot-out on an ice floe in the Bering Strait, it seems likely she'd win. Unless Dick Cheney was hunting in the vicinity, of course, in which case he'd probably accidentally kill them both.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/06/uselections2008.sarahpalin

"It would be a cheap shot to suggest that this week's bombshell revelation that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is herself pregnant was Palin's comeuppance."

Not comeuppance, but certainly natural consequences.

Sarah, teens fuck. They always have. They need condoms. Deal with it.

Just sayin'...

:shrug: