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.

Levi Johnston’s mother said her 18-year-old son left Alaska on Tuesday morning to join the Palin family at the convention where Sen. John McCain will officially receive the Republican nomination for president. The boy’s mother, Sherry Johnston, said there had been no pressure put on her son to marry 17-year-old Bristol Palin and the two teens had made plans to wed before it was known she was pregnant.

“This is just a bonus,” Johnston said.

The young man’s presence could set off a media frenzy around the young couple as photographers and cameramen scramble for pictures of the two teenagers. On Monday, Palin and her husband, Todd, said their 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, planned to have the baby and wed a young man identified only as Levi. The family asked the media to respect the young couple’s privacy as has been the tradition with children of candidates.

Sarah Palin is scheduled to address the convention Wednesday night and traditionally her family would join her at the conclusion of her speech.

Sherry Johnston said she was worried about her son dealing with all the attention. She said it was difficult enough for teenagers to deal with any pregnancy, having the entire nation watching made it worse.

Levi Johnston, a high school hockey player for Wasilla High School, is not listed on the team roster for 2008-2009, and his mother wouldn’t say if he graduated. She said simply he’s no longer a student and any further information would have to come from him.

The intense media scrutiny has stunned this suburban community about 40 miles north of Anchorage, with reporters camping out near the Johnston home.

“This is out of my league,” Sherry Johnston said. “I’m just a country gal and I want to keep it that way.”

She spoke Tuesday while standing in the driveway leading to her pale gray, two-story home situated on a densely wooded country lane. The home, like many in Alaska is adorned with moose and caribou antlers outside.

Many social conservatives have rallied behind Gov. Palin and her family’s troubles. The McCain campaign has said the Palins are like any other American family and that “life happens.”

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said that Palin’s family and her daughter’s pregnancy were not relevant to her potential performance as vice president. “I think people’s families are off limits,” Obama said. “And people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics.”

Just days after she was picked as McCain’s running mate, Gov. Palin has become a lightning rod for attention. Aside from her daughter’s pregnancy, it was disclosed that a private attorney has been retained for her in a legislative ethics investigation for her dismissal of Alaska’s public safety commissioner. It also was disclosed that Palin’s husband had been arrested on a drunken-driving charge two decades ago.

The couple, whose names cannot be published, filed a lawsuit against Canberra obstetrician Sydney Robert Armellin seeking more than $400,000 for the lifetime care of the second child.

Armellin mistakenly implanted two embryos instead of the one that had been sought.

The lawsuit, filed last year in the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory in Canberra, claims that as a result of the error and the additional child, the birth mother is unable to maintain her relationship with her same-sex partner.

The suit claimed that the birth of the second child created emotional stress and the women cannot afford to bring up two children with a combined income of just over $100,000.

The sperm used in the IVF treatment came from an anonymous Danish donor. The twin girls that resulted are now four years of age.

The partner of the birth mother told the court that the stress caused to the birth mother after learning she was about to have twins nearly destroyed their relationship.

Before the twins came along, the mother was described as confident and grounded and the women’s relationship strong.

Choking back tears the partner said that after the birth mother learned she was carrying twins everything changed.

“I find that she doesn’t have the same ability to love that she used to and the same capacity to, I guess, embrace differences and issues as a couple or as a team,” she said.

The attorney for the defendant, Dr Sydney Robert Armellin, suggested to the court that the problems faced by the couple were no different than those encountered by most other couples who become new parents.

In her ruling, Justice Annabelle Bennett said that while the women had expressed their desire for only one embryo to clinic staff, they had not stated that directly to the doctor.

Therefore,  she ruled, Bennett had not breached his duty and was not negligent.