I disagree with that for two reasons, but before I get to them, let me say that in no way do I consider it at all immoral for this girl to be pregnant, unmarried and seventeen. Her body is her property and her choices are hers and hers alone. They are, I’ll say, her responsibility, and I do also want to make clear that I’m against teen pregnancy on other—non morality-based—grounds. I think that today, in this society, teenaged motherhood severely limits a woman’s educational and career opportunities. It’s not true that that’s something a teenaged mother can never overcome, of course, but certainly makes things more difficult. That said, though, let me reiterate that my objection has anything at all to do with morality.
My issue here is with the ‘off limits’ question. Of course it’s not off limits. And, as I said, I have two reasons for feeling that way.
First: Hypocrisy.
That may not actually be the right term, but let me explain what I mean. Social Conservatives: This is what you get. If you’re against teaching children about contraception, and if you’re against abortion, teenaged parenthood is the only result that you can rationally expect. Teenagers want to have sex. They will go to extraordinary lengths to make that happen. If they don’t have sex safely, they will get pregnant. If they can’t have abortions, they will have babies instead. That’s just fact. The fact that this little drama plays itself out in thousands, or more probably tens of thousands of homes across a year in this country hasn’t, it seems, been enough to convince the hard right that there’s no getting away from it means that when a high profile case pops up on the media horizon it is fair game.
It’s completely fair for us to point to Bristol Palin and say “That’s what you get” because her mother chose to put her in the spotlight when she decided to accept the nomination. It’s fair for us to point to any pregnant teen who was raised by extremely socially conservative parents for the same reason. There’s a valid public interest point to be made: Don’t tell us to teach abstinence and not contraception. It didn’t work for your kids. How can you expect it to work for everyone else’s? Don’t tell us on the one hand that we should protect our daughters from having to become mothers that early and on the other that we can’t allow them to terminate their pregnancies. You can’t have both.
This sort of thing always reminds me of Dick Cheney’s daughter. I don’t know her name or anything about her other than the fact that she’s gay, and I’ll say honestly that if there was a backlash against the media when that came out, I don’t remember it. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that we had the same conversation then. Can’t use Cheney’s daughter’s lesbianism. Don’t talk about it. Don’t critique it. Don’t critique him because of it. Etc...
Again, I say, I couldn’t care less who she wants to sleep with, but I do think it’s okay for us to talk about it because of what it says about him. I don’t know how he feels about his daughter, but I’m betting he loves her like any father loves his child. What I don’t get is how he can stand to be associated with a party that believes en masse that she’s going straight to hell. I don’t understand why he didn’t stand up and say “My daughter has the right to get married, just like you do.” I don’t understand why he didn’t shout down the lunatic right on gay-rights issues once a week from his extraordinarily powerful pulpit. Those questions, in my opinion, make her choices fair game in the public policy debate and the same thing is true for Sarah Palin’s daughter.
Second: Nonsense.
Even more disturbing than the fact that we’re being told over and over and over again that this girl and her problem are off the table in this debate, is the reason we’re being given. No fewer than five times today, I heard that the pregnancy is irrelevant because Sarah Palin can’t be held responsible for Bristol Palin’s actions.
Hello? Are we living on the same planet?
Holding a parent responsible for her child’s actions is pretty much our national pastime. It’s something we’ve done since the dawn of human civilization. And you know what? There’s a reason for that.
Before I go into it, though, let me first say that I don’t think that the mere fact that something is traditional in our culture makes it a good policy. For example, we also got a lot of mileage—in the Middle Ages anyway—out of holding a parent’s actions against a child. That I think is crazy and wrong and I’m appalled by people who argue that we should go back to it. Which some people do argue, precisely on this issue. More than once, I've heard the argument that the bastard stigma was good for this country because it protected young girls from getting into exactly the situation that Bristol Palin is in right now.
The argument goes like this: Mothers care about their children. They even care deeply about the hypothetical children they may someday have. We want mothers to be married before they have children. If we threaten to treat children born out of wedlock like crap, it will terrorize potential mothers into being more careful.
It’s a good argument, I think, at least in the sense that it’s logical. For a long time it worked pretty well for discouraging interracial coupling, too. But that doesn’t make it right to stigmatize a person for his entire life for a decision that was made before he took his first breath on this planet. That’s insane.
Criticizing a parent for a decision her child makes, however, is not. It may not be fair. It may survive careful scrutiny of the facts underlying the situation. But it isn’t, on its face, crazy. Parents are charged with the task of training their children to make good decisions. If a child makes a bad decision, the parent’s job of training becomes is a fair subject for inquiry. There’s just no way around that. If Bristol Palin had become an armed robber, or a mass murderer, or a Republica... scratch that... or a vicious racist, we would be well within our rights to ask “Didn’t your mother teach you better than that?”
Now, I’m not saying a parent can be held accountable for every bad decision a child makes. Far from it. That, too, would be insane. As I’ve said: Teenagers want to have sex. Short of locking them in a basement until they’re married, there’s no way to be a hundred percent effective at preventing them from doing it out of wedlock. If you think there is, see Palin Family. In the great Reason vs. Hormones fight, Hormones is gonna kick Reason's ass every time. A parent can do everything possible to train a child that it’s wrong to hurt people, steal, drink alcohol or sugar cokes and have sex and that child will still make mistakes. It’s unavoidable. So, no, I don’t think it’s terribly probable that Sarah Palin can be blamed for this unfortunate turn of events, if ‘blame’ and ‘unfortunate’ are even the right words to use.
I just think that it’s a fair line of inquiry.
If we discover, for example, that Sarah Palin did teach
Furthermore, assuming again that Sarah Palin is anywhere near the mainstream for her party, I’d like to offer a quick hypothetical. Does anybody have any doubts about what her answer would have been if you’d asked her six months ago whether or not
And my final point, on that same issue: Bristol Palin is Sarah Palin’s minor child. She is responsible for her for actions. She’s legally responsible for her actions. If
