NEW YORK

IT’S NOT such a stretch to immediately think of the hit TV series Have Gun, Will Travel, which ran during 1957-1963, with its signature “Have Gun, Will Travel, Wire Paladin, San Francisco” motto, when confronted with the utterly bizarre, as well as thoroughly offensive to women, selection of one Sarah Palin for vice president.

For those too young to remember, the show starred Richard Boone as Paladin, a cultured, appealing gun-for-hire, a mercenary who would, for a $1,000 fee, do your dirty work for you. Gov. Sarah Palin, an NRA member, who loves to hunt and can use a gun just like Paladin, is today’s political equivalent of a 1950s TV-show character.

The similarity between the names Paladin and Palin adds a neat little touch of serendipity. But instead of a gun for hire, she’s a reproductive system for hire. That John McCain or Karl Rove or any of their henchmen could honestly think, even for one minute, that this woman could appeal to Hillary Clinton’s base, or pull in “disaffected” Clinton supporters, and other women, to vote Republican on Nov. 4, is sheer lunacy.

It’s also further proof that John McCain and the Republican Party believe that one woman is the same as the next. That voting women, and former Hillary Clinton supporters, are just too dumb to notice that this Governor Palin is anti-choice and a right-wing evangelical Christian who wants creationism taught in Alaska schools, who has no record of speaking out on equal pay for equal work, health care, child care, or anything at all relevant to the women- and family-oriented issues that are the heart and soul of the concerns of the women of the Democratic Party. (We won’t even bother to mention foreign policy here, because there is no Palin foreign policy record or experience to mention.)

Let’s move beyond spin and the surprise — rather shock — of McCain’s choice and see what it really says: disdain for women as equals, as power holders, power brokers and human beings. Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, or in the vice-presidential mansion, it’s the same thing. Palin isn’t female empowerment. She, who has benefited from decades of tireless work of the feminist movement, is a slap in the face to us all.

McCain, at 72, and with a history of cancer, didn’t pick a qualified, experienced female running mate. Certainly there must be a few out there among the Republican ranks of women public servants. How about Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, of Texas? Or Sen. Olympia Snow, of Maine?

Instead, all that mattered was that he pick a conservative uterus as running mate. Her praises were immediately being sung because of her opposition to abortion rights, and what a great woman candidate she makes for refusing to have an abortion when she learned she was pregnant with a Down syndrome child.

This fact, by the way, is something we neither want nor need to know about any woman, least of all one running for vice president. Not only is it a private matter that should be kept private. It is not a qualification for the second-highest office in America. Yet the very fact that we do know this, that it is one of the first things the Republicans trot out about her, only proves the point:

McCain wasn’t looking for a qualified Republican woman candidate who could lead from “day one” and be “commander-in-chief.” He wanted a reproductive vessel to boost his new, right-wing credentials. Republicans think we will be afraid to criticize Palin simply because she is a woman. They are wrong. They are always wrong. Look at the past eight years.

No doubt McCain also thinks he’s showing some of the so-called “maverick” stuff he’s supposedly famous for before he voted with Bush-Cheney 90-plus percent of the time during the past eight years. But this is not the choice of a maverick. Governor Palin is the choice of a man and a party so out of touch with their own country, it is as embarrassing as it is frightening.

Hilary Cosell, an occasional contributor, is a master’s-degree candidate at General Theological Seminary, and a Democrat.