Meet the mini-Palins

Like their precursor, the mini-Palins—Jane Norton (Colorado), Sue Lowden (Nevada), Kelly Ayotte (New Hampshire), and Cherilyn Eagar (Utah)—are all under (most well under) 60, beautiful, impressively fecund, unreservedly conservative, and stonily pro-life.

Three have almost identical traditional female résumés (the fourth, Ayotte, a former state attorney general, is a lawyer). A bachelor’s degree from a non-elite school. Went into show business, or became public school teachers—jobs that have been available to women since the golden age before the publication of The Feminine Mystique. In 1973, five years after feminists threw underwear into a freedom trash can to protest the Miss America contest, Nevada’s would-be senator, Sue Lowden, a Palin-esque would-be beauty queen, then Miss New Jersey, took her crown as second runner-up.

The traditional female candidates embrace religions with traditional beliefs, including, of course, traditional views of rights for women, gay men, and lesbians. Eagar is a lifelong and active Mormon, and Lowden describes her opposition to abortion rights as the product of her deepening Roman Catholic faith. Like Palin, Norton actively participates in a Pentacostal house of worship; she belongs to the Smoky Hill Vineyard Church. The pastor, Greg Thompson, says “of course” the church “is pro-life” and “believes that marriage is between a man and a woman.” The Vineyard movement has produced much writing and speaking against abortions and in favor of loving homosexuals so strongly that they’ll abandon their sexual “attractions.”