Seven years ago, I stood in a colleague’s office in New Jersey and watched on a 12-inch television as two planes and two towers changed our world.

Until the day before, I had worked on the top floor of the World Financial Center in New York City, and every morning walked the passageway from the World Trade Center train station to my building. It was pure coincidence I had changed business groups then, but it felt like a message, even to my agnostic soul.

Shortly thereafter, I sat down with my partner of 10 years and asked if she wanted to start a family. I knew her answer, for she had always wanted children, but until then, my career had been my priority. On September 11, however, a heightened sense of fleeting possibilities motivated me to carpe ovum.

Today, our son has just started kindergarten, and I have a different perspective on the debate swirling around Sarah Palin and her parenting decisions than I might have had otherwise. Much as I may disagree with the choices she has made, I respect her right to make them for herself and her family. I’ve seen firsthand the pettiness of mothers criticising each other’s parenting, and I cannot condone it.

I also respect her choice to be not only a working mother, but one who manages a high-powered career while some of her children are still young.

As a parent with only one child, part of me wonders how she can do it with five – but I’ve learned not to underestimate mothers. During the Beijing Olympics, just days before Palin’s nomination, a bevy of mothers with young children earned medals, including U.S. swimmer Dara Torres, several members of the U.S. softball and soccer teams, and a number of athletes from other countries, competing in rowing, kayaking, and gymnastics, among other sports. Clearly motherhood is no barrier to high achievement.

Despite all she represents in terms of the capabilities of modern mothers, however, Palin falls short for me in several ways. First and foremost is her conservative track record on LGBT and reproductive rights. If she won’t recognize my right to form a family when and how I want, or give us the same rights as others, she’s not getting my vote. It’s one thing to make decisions for her own family, but quite another when she starts to make them for mine.

I’ll leave aside for the moment the various arguments about how much falsehood or hypocrisy was in Palin’s statements of her political achievements. Others have dissected them in more detail than I can do here. Even if her assertions were all true (which I doubt), her candidacy still bothers me for another reason.

The McCain team seems to view the vice presidency as training for the presidency. As McCain advisor Charlie Black said about Palin after her speech at the Republican National Convention, “She’s going to learn national security at the foot of the master for the next four years.” Yes, the vice presidency is by definition a secondary role, but one that requires stepping up to the top spot at a moment’s notice.

Barack Obama chose in Joe Biden someone who could do so, a politician broadly equal in stature. One can’t say the same about McCain and Palin. They remind me of a very traditional married couple where, although the woman may be strong, her primary role is to support her husband’s career. If he is incapacitated, her prospects of managing on her own are slim.
Which brings us back to September 11. Should McCain not make it through the next four years, I do not want to risk having our country’s security run by someone who still has the training wheels on. My son–and all our children–deserve better than that.

Even if McCain remains in office, I do not want the future of my son and my country entrusted to someone who defines himself by the war he fought, someone whose campaign logo evokes the star and gold stripe of a naval admiral (a rank he never even held). Both McCain and Obama say their ultimate goal is peace, but I question whether someone self-defined by war will get us there.

September 11 helped guide me along the path to becoming a parent. In this week of remembrance for our country, then, when my son also happens to be starting his first year of school, both national security and motherhood are much on my mind. Although the McCain-Palin campaign is playing up both of these themes, I remain one mother unconvinced that their ticket is right for my family or our nation.

Our challenge now is not to underestimate this national newcomer, this “average hockey mom.” She is energizing the conservative base and making a serious bid for swing voters. Her hockey-mom toughness is real, even if her foreign-policy experience is weak.

Palin erred, however, when she belittled Obama’s time as a community organizer. What is a PTA mom, after all, but a community organizer? Those of us who don’t agree with the McCain-Palin solutions for our country will talk with our friends and neighbors, volunteer at our local Obama headquarters, and get out the vote.

We will put Obama stickers on our strollers and minivans, and pass them out, yes, even at hockey practice. I have no doubt many lesbian moms will be part of this effort, for we are used to fighting for our families and our beliefs. Just call us pit bulls in Chapstick.
Dana Rudolph is the founder and publisher of Mombian (www.mombian.com), a blog and resource directory for LGBT parents. She also writes a regular column on LGBT parenting for several LGBT newspapers around the country. Her column exploring the intersection of politics and parenting will appear every other Thursday at 365gay.com.