Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

In last week’s episode of Family Guy, Chris tries to date Ellen, a girl with Down Syndrome. During their first date, Chris, struggling to make conversation, asks her what her parents do for work. “My dad’s an accountant, and my mom is the former governor of Alaska,” she says. The one-liner didn’t sit well with the inferred governor, who used Facebook, that venue of all truly serious discourse, to say that it “felt like another kick to the gut.”

I’ve watched the episode in question, and I’m left wondering what made Sarah Palin’s gut feel so cruelly kicked. That a person with Down Syndrome is portrayed as worthy of teenage affection and desire? That Ellen is capable of living a life as normal as any other teen? How does that constitute a kick to the gut, exactly? The Palins (Bristol Palin has also made some public comments about the episode) seem dead set on interpreting the entire episode as an attack not just on persons with Down Syndrome, but on Trig Palin, specifically. Frankly I think it’s a stretch to see the episode as offensive to the disabled community (the jokes are remarkably tame by Family Guy‘s notorious standards), and outright ludicrous to conclude that the show’s writers set out to mock a specific infant.

But this is America, by gum, and just as Seth MacFarlane has the right to express his nonsense in public, so do the Palin family. In her comments on the episode Bristol said, “People with special needs face challenges that many of us will never confront, and yet they are some of the kindest and most loving people you’ll ever meet,” which is one of the most ignorant things someone could possibly say about persons with disabilities. Disability is not a virtue in itself. Having a disability does not automatically make someone a better person. Bristol’s comment is particularly ironic since the entire purpose of the Chris/Ellen story was to make exactly this point. Chris ends up dumping Ellen after their first date because she is a demanding, overbearing, terrible person, disability or not.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out that in her capacity as a Fox News pundit Palin asked, “When are we going to be willing to say, you know, some things just aren’t really funny?” Probably around the time that Glenn Beck gets pulled off your network for calling the sitting President a racist, which is to say, never. Of course, the Family Guy joke in question wasn’t really about Trig, it was more of a small jab at his mother. This isn’t really about Palin’s motherly outrage so much as it is about her penchant for victimhood and her inability to accept any comment that even mildly conflicts with her personal narrative of Conservative Sainthood, Unsmartened Wisdom, and American Greatness.

I’ll leave the rest to Andrea Fay Friedman, the actress who voiced Ellen and who herself has Down Syndrome. In response to Palin’s comments she wrote, “I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line ‘I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska’ was very funny. I think the word is ‘sarcasm’. In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.”