Sometimes, I wish Sarah Palin would just shut up.

As matter of fact, I feel bad about giving her ridiculous opinions even more attention by writing this article. It seems that no matter how talk and write about her, no matter how negatively, the more she’s in the public spotlight. Since the 2008 election, she has resigned from the Alaskan governorship, “written” a memoir, become a pundit on Fox News and delivered a speech at the Tea Party convention. I don’t see Biden in the papers nearly as often, and he’s the guy who won the vice presidency.

But Palin has taken this public spotlight and run with it to make herself look and sound like a disability rights advocate.

This Valentine’s Day, the popular animated comedy, Family Guy, aired an episode that featured a Down syndrome character, Ellen, who goes on a date with a regular character, Chris. Chris asked his date what her parents do for a living and she responded, “my dad’s an accountant and my mom’s the governor of Alaska.”

Sarah Palin, who has a young son with Down Syndrome, and her daughter Bristol, immediately responded on Facebook. In their response, they wrote that the episode felt like a “kick in the gut” and called the Family Guy writers “heartless jerks.”

I really doubt, though, that Sarah Palin watches Family Guy very often. If she did, she would know that Family Guy mocks every group and type of person imaginable, often with more bite than the “my mom’s the governor of Alaska” joke.

I would dismiss this as just another example of Sarah Palin throwing a fit for publicity and try to ignore it, if Andrea Fay Friedman, the voice actress who played Ellen, hadn’t given such a great response.

“I’m not making fun of Down Syndrome people…” Friedman said in an interview with The Insider. “She has no right to say that. It would be nice if she had a sense of humor. It was only a joke… she could laugh once in a while instead of being serious. What’s wrong with being funny?” Friedman also criticized the way Palin often uses her son, Trig, for political advantage.

“Don’t treat him like a loaf of bread,” she said, “he needs a normal life, like I have…she [uses Trig] because she wants to have more votes. And that’s not right.”

Friedman is spot on with her assessment of how Palin uses her son. Palin constantly mentions Trig in situations like the Family Guy critique and in her pro-life arguments. Sometimes it seems as if she talks about Trig so much in order to justify her decision to not abort him when she discovered he had Down Syndrome. Raising any child is difficult, but raising a child who needs so much extra care and attention is extremely difficult.

As a feminist, I support Palin’s decision to be a working mom. She has five children, including Trig, and an infant grandchild and she still finds the time to be in the spotlight and gets paid for her opinions. While I don’t agree with anything she says and find the way she prides herself on her children and their struggles exploitative, she still has the right and responsibility to earn money for herself and her family.

It seems that she is more active when she isn’t in office—now that she is no longer governor of Alaska she seems to thrust herself further into the public spotlight. Perhaps if she found a way to balance a career and spend more time with her children, it would improve her as a person and mother and it would help Trig, as Friedman put it, “live a normal life.”

Published in : Perspectives, Volume 101: Issue 24