by Chris Bodenner
Nancy French, who ghostwrote Bristol's book and spent a lot of time in the Palin household, takes aim at a Room For Debate forum on parenting:
What the New York Times really wants to do is challenge gender roles generally. After all, why don’t men take off work to stay home, instead of their over-worked, stressed-out wives? Well, it feels silly to point this out to a panel of experts, but men and women are different. We have complementary skills and abilities. Women, for example, are the ones with stretch marks and breasts that nourish. Men cannot gestate a baby, no matter how manicured, effeminized, and metrosexual society tries to make them. … [Women with careers] causes parents to strain against nature’s order of things by hiring out child-care, breast pumping, using formula, and sometimes asking men to trade their jobs for aprons.
And what exactly is Todd Palin doing these days? Last I heard, he quit his BP job in 2009, just as the money from Sarah's book and speaking gigs started rolling in:
"Todd loved his union job on the Slope and hopes to return," Meghan Stapleton, Sarah Palin's personal spokeswoman, said in an e-mail Friday. "For now, he is spending time with his family."
How "effeminized" of him. But French, in a Politico profile, gushes over Todd's current role:
Calling Todd Palin perhaps “the impressive family member,” French described him as a caring father “who’s very handsome … more so than the ‘Saturday Night Live’ renditions of him might suggest.”
So French's NRO rhetoric is completely at odds not only with the reality of most modern families, but with the reality of the very household she praises so much. When Sarah was governor, the Palin family model – both parents working and balancing household responsibilites – was refreshing coming from a conservative political family. It's a step backward, and incoherent, for French to suggest otherwise.
(Photo: Todd, Tripp, and Sarah greet fans at the Best Buy Rotunda at Mall of America on June 29, 2011 in Bloomington, Minnesota. By Adam Bettcher/Getty Images)
The Dish 