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Posted
Wednesday, September 24, 2008 2:59 PM
| By
Rachael Larimore
When I'd read that Wasilla, during Sarah Palin's mayoral tenure, had a practice of charging victims for their "rape kits"—the forensic examination required to gather evidence against the perpetrator—I was as horrified as anyone else. The explanation that it was the policy of the local police chief doing the billing, and even a quote by a Democratic member of the state legislature that Palin probably knew nothing about the policy, brought little comfort. At the same time, it just didn't make any sense, so I tempered my horror with skepticism.
Fortunately, it turns out that skepticism wins the day. Thanks to very thorough debunkings by bloggers Charlie Martin of Explorations and Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee, we can put this bit of nastiness to rest.
First off, the Wasilla police chief, Charlie Fannon, is on record as having tried to bill victims' insurance companies, not the victims themselves, for the rape kits. In other towns in Alaska, hospitals were trying to bill victims, prompting an Alaska state law forbidding the practice. If this practice still seems creepy or exclusive to macho, rough-and-tumble Alaska, well, it happens to be the practice in other states, too, like North Carolina (until recently) and ... Illinois.
Some conservative bloggers are trying to play "gotcha" and point out that Barack Obama co-sponsored a bill in the Illinois state senate that provides state money to cover services provided to victims who have neither state aid or insurance, meaning that Illinois also tries to get insurance companies to pay up, just like little ol' Wasilla. Best I can tell from my rudimentary reading of the Illinois code, Obama co-sponsored an amendment to existing legislation that already had the insurance clause in there, and the amendment had nothing to do with rape kits. So, I'm not going to engage in gotcha-ism. We could play that game all day long.
What bothers me is that, while the media has been quick to investigate and shoot down every claim that Sarah Palin makes—that she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere, that she opposes earmarks—the nasty rumors are taken at face value. It takes bloggers, working on their own time and with tools no fancier than Google, to figure out that she's not personally sending bills for $1,200 to traumatized rape victims and that no, she did NOT cut funding for teen mothers, unless you define "cut" as not providing as much of a budget increase as had been had asked for (same with funding "cuts" for Catholic Charities and the Special Olympics).
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