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# Double standards
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/double-standards/
- Published: 2008-09-16T09:09:15.000Z
- Updated: 2019-02-14T22:41:39.000Z
- Author: openUSA Openusa
- Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 18:49

The email below has been doing the rounds in American cyberspace, and recently arrived in openUSA's inbox. It makes a stark point about the double standards in media coverage of the election. 

*I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.....*

\* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."

\* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

\* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

\* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

\* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

\* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

\* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.

\* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

\* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.

\* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.

\* If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.

\* If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

\* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.

\* If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DUI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now.