The beautiful Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, a frontier woman of many parts, some of them controversial and others contradictory, a hunter, a staunch conservative who supposedly has bedeviled the corrupt and the wasteful in the Alaskan government, a mother of five children, the youngest with Down’s syndrome, is now John McCain’s vice presidential nominee. With this nomination McCain has found redemption in the eyes of evangelical Christians, including James Dobson of “Focus on the Family” fame. Sarah Palin, with her strict opposition to abortion, supposedly is a woman after James Dobson’s heart.

Dobson is not daunted by the skeletons in Palin’s closet, now wide open to public scrutiny thanks to the ever curious media. Rather, he and his fellow evangelical Christians are pleased that Bristol Palin, Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, pregnant out of wedlock, has decided to keep her child and marry the father, positive proof of the Palin family’s veneration for life from conception. Many shrewd Republican politicians express the view that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is a private matter, where the only decent thing for the media to do would be to leave the young girl alone.