Since John McCain’s Friday announcement of Governor Sarah Palin as his pick for a Vice Presidential running mate, my inbox has been filled with comments, especially from women.  First, all of the women who wrote were ecstatic at McCain’s choice.

A woman on the Republican ticket!  Hallelujah!!!!

A few thought it looked like a pander for women’s votes; I disagree.  It’s about drilling for oil emerging as one of the most important issues this year, more than anything else.  Sarah Palin recently negotiated a deal with Canada to run a natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the lower 48 states.  Sixty-four percent of Americans support the drill-here-drill-now position.  You do the electoral math.

Never mind real issues, though, the mostly-leftist mainstream press has utterly seized upon things they perceive as problems with Palin’s candidacy, and guess what?  Those problems revolve around her motherhood, whether or not the mother of an infant can be Vice President, and now whether we should trust a woman whose 17 year-old daughter is pregnant out-of-wedlock.

Anyone who believes that anyone would be discussing these things if Palin were a father instead of mother is living on another planet.  The leftist press is demonstrating its true colors once again this year, as sexists of the lowest order, and a good many of these commentators are women.

The whole thing makes me sick.

One woman wrote to me that it is just awful that we now must contend with this disgraceful out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and obviously Palin didn’t even teach her own daughter about birth control.

What balderdash!  How dare she assume that!

In the first place, there is only one - ONE AND ONLY ONE - failsafe method of birth control, and that is ABSTINENCE.  Condoms have a 20% failure rate; even the pill has a 3% failure rate.  Those rates apply only when the methods are used with 100% perfect precision, according to the manufacturer’s instructions.  And if anyone in this Country is guilty of giving out faulty information on the success of birth control, it is our public schools and sex education teachers, who fail across the board to inform students that NO BIRTH CONTROL METHOD IS PERFECT, EXCEPT ABSTINENCE.  For this, we have the virulent public policies of Democrats to thank.

So, don’t go blaming Sarah Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy on Sarah Palin or on conservatives, who happen to support abstinence education that seeks to counteract the false promises made by libertine sex education experts.

What gall!

On the matter of whether the mother is, in any way, responsible for the choices her teenage daughter has made, I submit that anyone who could think she is, has either never had children of one’s own or has not gotten them past the teen years.  Some of the best mothers I’ve ever known have had to deal with this very problem and a host of others, for which the mother is not responsible.

Now to the matter of whether Sarah Palin can handle continuing to raise 5 children and take on the Vice Presidency.   Those who have presumed to think that she cannot, probably do not understand the differences between large families and very small ones.  In larger families, the older children help with a great deal of things pertaining to their younger siblings.  Many of the tasks that only parents can take care of in small families, are handled by older siblings in larger families.

As a Catholic, I know a great many mothers of larger-than-average families, and have seen how the older siblings provide so much help to their younger brothers and sisters that the parents actually seem to be needed less than they are in small families, without this advantage.

Needless to say, this is an entirely personal matter that only an individual can make for her own family, and those who opine about it seem not to know the meaning of minding one’s own business.

The bedrock beliefs that I have always espoused as a pro-life, pro-motherhood feminist, rest upon the idea that each woman is an individual.  Each woman should be free to decide what is best for her and her own family.

The bottom line for the leftist women lining up to smear Sarah Palin on the motherhood issues, I believe, is that they absolutely hate the fact that this woman has managed to have a terrific career without resorting to aborting her offspring.  For the past 40 years, Marxist feminists have peddled the theory that a woman’s advancement in the workplace was entirely dependent upon the legally sanctioned freedom to murder her children in the womb.

Sarah Palin puts this whole theory in the dustbin with the other rubbish of Marxist failures.

Bravo Sarah!  Well done.

Now, I sincerely hope that the remainder of this campaign will be spent leaving the Palin family to deal with their personal lives, while the rest of us concentrate on electing McCain/Palin in November