Sarah Palin set the perimeters. A devotee of family values and no sex before Holy Matrimony, the Alaska governor and her supporters are now bleating because the national press is holding her to her own standards.
John McCain's barely vetted VP made herself fair game.
Palin’s been the hypocrite. By conservative, conventional standards, what kind of family values is it for a mother of five--one a four-month-old with Down Syndrome, another a distressed pregnant teenager—to forsake her personal parenting responsibilities to chase a job that would take her much further away from house and home? And yes, by conservative, conventional standards, isn’t the wedding supposed to come before the baby?
I’m in total agreement with what Francis L. Holland posted on his blog last night:
The Strange Pregnancy of the Palin Family
Not everyone will run this photo, but I will because I want someone to explain to me what's going on! For example, the girl in green is seven months pregnant, but where's the football player who's supposed to be marrying her and legitimating her child (or their premarital sex), however you want to see it? I think the purpose of their getting married is to legitimate, ex post facto, the (one or two) instances of premarital sex.
Now, the Governor preaches against sex education and instead favors abstinence until marriage. Apparently she hasn't been able to convince her own daughter, much less the rest of the country.
I think the failure to teach contraception alternatives basically turns pregnancy into the punishment that young girls suffer if they have sex. How can a baby be a "punishment"? A baby can be a punishment if the mother and father had no intention of having a baby, but they end up with one anyway because their parents refused to teach them about birth control and, in fact, did everything in their power to make birth control unavailable. To me, it's the moral equivalent of refusing women mamographies while instructing them to either not get cancer or to pray their cancer away. When you live in the real world, you take advantage of modern medical science instead of denying that it exists in the first place.
So, congratulations, Governor Palin. Your family stands as a testament to all that you believe in, so the rest of us can believe in something different.
Before I hear from the wing-nuts, charging that this is sexist or spinning that the idea that it’s family values because no choices were made here, I want to make it plain that as a parent who had to shepherd two sons through their teen years, I personally don’t believe a parent can control all that a teenager does or does not do.
One more thing, thanks to her crusading mother, poor 17-year-old Bristol got caught in the crosshairs of the MSM. Gov. Palin is also a gun-toting, NRA disciple. Had Bristol Palin shot herself or someone else that, too, would have been big news.
When you step into the national spotlight, you can’t whine when your most pertinent family secrets are suddenly exposed.
Stumble It!
