So Wrong it Hurts

The blind fury and twisted rage with which the liberal left, especially in the media, has greeted Sarah Palin's arrival upon the political scene seems so extreme, it makes your Bloviator suspect the source of the anger goes beyond the "hockey mom" from Alaska to something more intrinsic: natural law, as expressed in the Ten Commandments.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches

Natural law states the first and essential precepts which govern the moral life. It hinges upon the desire for God and submission to him, who is the source and judge of all that is good, as well as upon the sense that the other is one's equal. Its principal precepts are expressed in the Decalogue.

As Thomas Aquinas states:

The natural law is nothing other than the light of understanding placed in us by God; through it we know what we must do and what we must avoid. God has given this light or law at the creation.

So what does all this have to do with the Protestant Sarah Palin pissing off liberal elites, especially those in the media? Ms. Palin and her husband recently decided to bring their fifth child, diagnosed with Down's Syndrome, into the world rather than to abort it. Since then the Palins have encouraged their pregnant seventeen-year-old daughter to permit her unexpected child to live and went even further by welcoming the child's father into their family. These decisions of the Palins are at once entirely in accord with the teachings of the Church and wildly disparate from the self-centered secular humanism that so dominates our culture and subscribed to by most members of the media.

The Palin family, for all its "ups and downs," as Sarah Palin described it in her acceptance speech, is vivid witness to God's natural law. The Church teaches us natural law obtains in all persons, that it is, in the words of Pope Leo XIII, "written and engraved in the soul of each and every man, because it is human reason ordaining him to do good and forbidding him to sin." That is the case even for those secular and cynical moral relativists in the media and is, I suspect, what gets them into such high dudgeon over people like Sarah Palin. To them it is not a matter of Palin making the wrong decisions but, rather, the right ones, thus bringing to the surface what natural law already nags them about from deep within: they are the ones in the wrong, not her.

Liberal elites, of course, don't like being reminded they are wrong and will thus do whatever it takes to besmirch the character of public figures, especially attractive and vivacious ones like Sarah Palin, who, through their own good acts, make the elites' wrongness so obvious and painful to behold. Ripping her to shreds may serve as a palliative for the pain, albeit not a long-lasting one, so it must be repeated often. The upcoming election should prove to be uncommonly nasty.