Kevin Burke, co-founder of something called Rachel’s Vineyard – a “post-abortion healing ministry” run by the right-wing group Priests for Life – offers his explanation of why people might not like Sarah Palin. It turns out that they are all traumatized by the “collective grief, pain and guilt” they feel over their pro-choice views:
The very personal and often uncharitable criticism of Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her family evident in recent media coverage, and the lack of support from many feminist and child advocacy groups, may have a relationship to the collective grief, pain and guilt from personal involvement in the abortion of an unborn child.
When an issue strikes at a deeply repressed sensitive wound in a person, often the initial reaction is anger.
…
Seeing the Palin family, in a very visible public forum, with an uncompromising and public pro life philosophy arouses deeply repressed feelings in post abortive parents, as well as media members, counselors, health care professionals, politicians and others who promote abortion rights, especially the abortion of children with challenges such as Down syndrome.
These powerful repressed feelings of grief, guilt and shame can be deflected from the source of the wound (i.e., abortion) and projected onto an often uncharitable focus upon the trigger of these painful emotions…the Palin family.
And all this time I thought it was because she was a one-term unknown whose sole qualification for John McCain’s ticket was her appeal to the GOP’s right-wing base.
