Published: September 03, 2008 02:05 pm         

Three cheers for the moose hunter

The phone rang mid-morning last Friday and the caller was our eldest daughter in Pensacola, Fla. With Hurricane Gustav approaching the Gulf Coast, I assumed she was calling to say they were evacuating to stay with friends in Tennessee for the weekend while the storm passed — or that all was well. As it turned out, my hunch was wrong.

In an excited voice she asked, “What do you think of McCain’s choice?”

The only McCain I know is Senator McCain from Arizona, and I’m not exactly a fan. The two of us have one thing in common: We’re both pro-life.

Although I was aware that the senator was prepared to announce his choice of a running mate, I wasn’t following the story.

To be fair, I haven’t followed Barack Obama either. His convention in Denver got very little airtime at our house, and his choice of a running mate, Joe Biden of Delaware, was anti-climatic.

After hanging up, I logged onto the Internet, and FoxNews.com was announcing that Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, had been tapped to serve as John McCain’s running mate. Here is what I discovered about Gov. Palin before McCain introduced her to the crowd in Dayton, Ohio:

• She led her high school basketball team in Wasilla, Alaska, to the state title in 1982.

• She is an unabashed, pro-life Christian.

• She hunts moose and fishes for salmon.

• She is the mother of five children.

• Her eldest son, Track, enlisted in the Army on Sept. 11, 2007, and he will be deployed to Iraq on Sept. 11, 2008.

• Her youngest child, Trig, was born in April with Down syndrome.

• Her husband is part Yup’ik Eskimo, and is a blue-collar North Slope oil worker who competes in the Iron Dog, a 1,900-mile snowmobile race.

Sarah Palin is not the first woman to run as a vice presidential candidate. That honor goes to Geraldine Ferraro, who ran with Walter Mondale in 1984.

Regardless of where you stand politically, this year’s campaign is a campaign of firsts: the first African-American presidential candidate, the first senior citizen candidate, the first Republican female vice presidential candidate, and the first vice presidential pick of a major party to have a very obvious set of hair plugs.

When Paul wrote the Galatians, he foretold of a day when there would no longer be, “…Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female …” (Galatians 3:28, NIV).

In 1963, Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when his children would be judged “…not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” I would suggest we do the same when it comes to gender differences. The gender of our candidates doesn’t matter nearly as much as the convictions they champion.

We taught our daughters to dream big, disregard the traditional limitations of a narrow-minded society and become all that God intended for them. So just in case Sen. McCain is reading, I like the moose hunter.

Tony Thomas is a church pastor, a high school basketball coach and author of “A Smidgeon of Religion.” He can be reached through the newspaper at ptnews@pharostribune.com