Palin expands on her positions with Katie Couric Nick Cargo and David Edwards

Published: Tuesday September 30, 2008





Print This Email This "I am an open book," Alaska Governor and vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin told CBS' Katie Couric. "My record is out there and my life is out there."



In an interview aired Tuesday night, Governor Palin elaborated on energy, reproductive rights, climate change, feminism and homosexuality with Couric.



"I'm a feminist," Palin said, "who...believes in equal rights and I believe that women certainly today have every opportunity that a man has to succeed, and to try to do it all, anyway. And I'm very, very thankful that I've been brought up in a family where gender hasn't been an issue."



On tapping the nation's national resources, Couric asked if "drill, baby, drill" could be construed as misleading given that domestic oil drilling would take 10 years to impact the market. "It's why we should have started 10 years ago," Palin said. "Alaska has billions of barrels of oil and hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of clean, green natural gas onshore and offshore."



When Palin and presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain were asked about their differing views on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (McCain against, and Palin for), McCain asked, "Did you expect two mavericks...to agree on everything?"



After a speech at Capital University, Couric asked Palin about a comment she made on how long Senator Joseph Biden, her opponent, had been in the Senate. "I'm looking forward to meeting him," she told the audience. "I've never met him before, but I've been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was in, like, second grade."



"When you have a 72-year-old running mate," Couric asked, "is that kind of a risky thing to say, insinuating that Joe Biden's been around a while?"



Biden, Palin told Couric, has the "years of experience" in the Senate, while she is the "new energy; the new face; the new ideas."



"If a 15-year-old is raped by her father," Couric asked, "do you believe it should be illegal for her to get an abortion, and why?"



Palin called herself "unapologetic" in her pro-life stance. "I would counsel to choose life. I would also like to see a culture of life in this country. But I would also like to take it one step further. Not just saying I am pro-life and I want fewer and fewer abortions in this country, but I want them, those women who find themselves in circumstances that are absolutely less than ideal, for them to be supported, and adoptions made easier."



On being pressed by Couric on whether she would force a victim of incest or rape to have the child, Palin said, "...personally, I would counsel the person to choose life, despite horrific, horrific circumstances that this person would find themselves in. And, if you're asking, though, kind of foundationally here, should anyone end up in jail for having an...abortion, absolutely not. That's nothing I would ever support." After repeated questioning about her position on the morning-after pill, Palin repeated her views and said that she would "not choose to participate in that kind of contraception."



Palin also supported the teaching of evolution as an "accepted principle," while also saying that she sees the "hand of God in this beautiful creation that is Earth."



"I say that also as the daughter of a school teacher, a science teacher, who has really instilled in me a respect for science," she added. "It should be taught in our schools."



"I am not going to judge Americans and the decisions that they make in their adult lives," Palin said. Palin recently faced criticism for her membership in the Wasilla Bible Church, which supported the "Love Won Out" conference in Anchorage, whose participants were of the belief that homosexual inclinations could be controlled or eliminated using religion. "I have one of my absolute best friends for the last 30 years happens to be gay, and I love her dearly. And she is not my 'gay friend,' she is one of my best friends, who happens to have made a choice that isn't a choice that I have made. But I am not going to judge people."



On asking what publications she has read to form her worldview and verse herself on the issues, Palin said, "I've read most of them...with a great appreciation for the press--for the media...all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years."



The following video was broadcast on CBS' Evening News on September 30, 2008.









Download video via RawReplay.com





