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David Talbot writes in Salon today about his interview with Rev. Howard Bess, a Baptist Minister in Palmer, Alaska, and the author of Pastor, I am Gay, one of the books in the book banning controversy surrounding former Mayor Sarah Palin and the Wasilla Library. Talbot also reveals that Palin has been involved in street protests attempting to prevent women from their legal rights to obtain an abortion in Alaska.

Soon after the book controversy, Bess found himself again at odds

with Palin and her fellow evangelicals. In 1996, evangelical churches

mounted a vigorous campaign to take over the local hospital’s community

board and ban abortion from the valley. When they succeeded, Bess and

Dr. Susan Lemagie, a Palmer OB-GYN, fought back, filing suit on behalf

of a local woman who had been forced to travel to Seattle for an

abortion. The case was finally decided by the Alaska Supreme Court,

which ruled that the hospital must provide valley women with the

abortion option.

At one point during the hospital battle, passions ran so hot that

local antiabortion activists organized a boisterous picket line outside

Dr. Lemagie’s office, in an unassuming professional building across

from Palmer’s Little League field. According to Bess and another

community activist, among the protesters trying to disrupt the

physician’s practice that day was Sarah Palin.

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped

push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school

board. "She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the

board," said Munger, a music composer and teacher. "I bumped into her

once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of

God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your

father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on

everything.’

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"I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less

than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth

at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of

dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them."

Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days,

the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. "She looked in my

eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my

lifetime.’"

Bess is unnerved by the prospect of Palin — a woman whose mind is

given to dogmatic certitude — standing one step away from the Oval

Office. "It’s truly frightening that someone like Sarah has risen to

the national level," Bess said. "Like all religious fundamentalists —

Christian, Jewish, Muslim — she is a dualist. They view life as an

ongoing struggle to the finish between good and evil.