Sarah Palin is causing some Southern Baptist Christians to be just a little hypocritical:
Within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, a woman may not lead a church or a home. But prominent Southern Baptists see nothing wrong with Sarah Palin serving as vice president — or perhaps even commander-in-chief someday.
In other words: A woman can run the White House, just not her own house.
Here are one relevant passage from the Christian Bible (it is included in the article itself): “But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet” (1 Timothy 2:12). (Emphasis added.)
As Dick Cheney’s tenure has shown, the Office of the Vice President is one that can have a lot of authority. The vice president also has a large staff that, in the end, reports directly to him. Unless Palin would hire a staff comprised entirely of women and interact only with females serving in the federal government, she would be a woman exercising authority over a man.
Southern Baptist Christians, of course, are biblical literalists and fundamentalists, so this would be something they could not endorse. But for the last twenty years, the religious right and political right in the United States have become two sides of the same coin. They always need to be on the same page. If the Southern Baptists would state that a woman serving as vice president would be a violation of a biblical commandment, then that could potentially cost John McCain millions of votes.
In a world in which politics and religion are fused together, political realities usually take precedence over purity of belief. And there is a word for that: hypocrisy.
