I am no Sarah Palin fan. If she were elected the next president of the United States I think it would be fair to interpret it as a crisis in our democracy.
Of course Palin has been a favorite target of liberals in the media and the latest point of criticism has been her reading habits. Lately Palin has been telling reporters and interviewers that she has been reading C.S. Lewis. This has prompted all kinds of attacks from pundits. On MSNBC, commentator Richard Wolffe ridiculed Palin for reading Lewis. So did comedian Joy Behar.
Frankly, these comments by Wolffe and Behar say more about Wolffe and Behar than they do about Sarah Palin. I will let Michael Flaherty, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explain. Here is a snippet of his op-ed:
Mrs. Palin is on the right track by giving C.S. Lewis a prominent place on her reading list. Yet Ms. Behar and other Palin critics have dismissed Lewis’s work, forgetting that Lewis was a medieval and renaissance scholar at Oxford and the author of several brilliant Christian apologetics. Ms. Behar’s dismissal of children’s books as less than important makes her a modern-day Eustace, the type of bully who mocks readers of fairy tales as simpletons.
Lewis thought quite the opposite. He thought that fairy tales were the best way to convey truth for children and adults alike. He wrote about this quite often in his letters, and took no shame in reading fairy tales out loud in British pubs with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the epic “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
Nowhere is this more poignantly expressed than in his dedication to Lucy Barfield in “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.”
“You are already too old for fairy tales,” he wrote to the young Lucy, “but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” Hopefully that day will come soon for Ms. Behar as well.
Wolffe and Behar have no clue.
I would critique her reading choices only so far as to question whether she has been reading C.S. Lewis to solidify her Christian Right vote, but after thinking about that question I would have to say it is absurd. She unfortunately has that voting bloc locked in already.
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