Sarah Palin: Bizarre—or Brilliant?

I’m sure most of you have heard that the Supreme Court has signed off on Westboro Baptist Church’s right to picket near funerals.
Sarah Palin’s tweeted response to this: “Common sense & decency absent as wacko “church” allowed hate msgs spewed@ soldiers’ funerals but we can’t invoke God’s name in public square.” Salon describes it as “bizarre,” but I’m wondering if it isn’t smart politics on Palin’s part.
As constitutional reasoning, it’s certainly stupid. People invoke God’s name in the public square all the time—in fact, that’s exactly what Phelps’ gay-hating followers do when they claim God strikes down our soldiers because America allows homosexuals to walk around free.
And “common sense” is not the basis for our constitutional rights, which is a good thing. Depending on the era of history, people have been convinced that common sense proved women should not vote (or weigh in on public policy), blacks are inferior, only Christians should hold public office and that men should get hired and promoted instead of women. And other people have held common sense tells us exactly the opposite. Common sense isn’t an infallible guide to anything, and in many cases, it’s simply a short form for prejudice.
One example: The scientist Broca, some centuries back, asserted that while it was possible some of the difference in brain size between men and women (back when brain size was assumed to equal intelligence) was due to men having bigger body sizes, since it was obvious women were stupider than men, common sense showed that must be the main reason for the difference (as described in Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man).
So if Palin’s sincere, that was pretty idiotic reasoning. If, on the other hand, she’s posturing for her followers, it’s pretty sharp. Asserting “it’s common sense!” avoids any need to actual explain herself or offer compelling reasons why the Supreme Court decision was bad. And it appeals to the kind of anti-intellectual prejudice I blogged about here—people who know what’s true and what’s false and realize fancy-schmancy constitutional reasoning (or any similar intellectual exercise) is just a way to duck the plain facts, which are obvious to anyone but over-educated Ivy League elitist intellectuals.
So a tweet like this just confirms Palin’s standing as a simple, plain-spoken frontierswoman who understands what Real Americans all know and filthy stinking liberals try to deny.
Or possibly it shows she’s a shallow idiot with no grasp whatever of Constitutional principles. Lacking telepathy, I can’t tell what’s in her head (I wonder, for instance, if she’d find the ruling quite so nonsensical if Phelps were targeting gay funerals the way he used to instead of American soldiers?).
It’s true Thomas Paine wrote a book called Common Sense, but that book isn’t really about common sense. It’s a detailed, well-reasoned look at all the justifications for monarchy and how none of them hold up under close scrutiny. Paine goes to great lengths to prove that independence is common sense; Palin (and similar unreasoners) don’t.
For a bonus, Slacktivist discusses how the Supreme Court decision undercuts right-wing claims that gay rights will inevitably lead to the government silencing religious criticism of gays.