Lay Off Bristol

Even Obama gets it. Yesterday he told reporters that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy has no relevance to the campaign. The NY Times reports that he said, “Our people were not involved in any way in this and they will not be. And if I ever thought there was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they’d be fired, O.K.?…I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories.”

Good for Obama. If only my friends would listen to their so-called Obama god and stop saying it’s “hilarious” that Palin has a pregnant teenage daughter. They see it as hypocritical of a governor who supports abstinence-only sex education in her state to have her eldest daughter get knocked up. Or they’re like Sally Quinn and think that Governor Palin can’t possibly juggle such family drama and the vice presidency at the same time.

Let me respond by first saying that Michele and Barack Obama are working parents, and yet no one is questioning their commitment to their children. As McCain’s chief strategist told the NY Times yesterday, Palin has “been a very effective governor and again I can’t imagine that question being asked of a man.”  I don’t think it would actually occur to me to ask this question of Hilary or Nancy Pelosi at any stage of their child-rearing years.

Such discussion leads to another comment made by the liberal pundits this weekend – isn’t there some classism going on, considering that Bristol Palin has so much more support compared to a typical poor black teenage mother? Well, yes, she does have a better network of support and wealth. Is this really a ding against the Governor though? Maybe Sarah Palin will now actually have more sympathy for families dealing with this problem. Maybe she’ll understand the range of emotions a young person experiences when faced with such a difficult choice. The pain associated with becoming a mother when you’re not ready isn’t only related to not being financially supported – it’s very much based inside the individual and her family dynamics. I bet Sarah Palin understands this better than so many of us, even if we’ve known families dealing with teenage pregnancies.

Liberals have also argued that Palin’s support of abstinence-only sex education seems to have bitten her in the foot here – did it not work even for her own daughter? they ask. To this I say a couple things – first, to apply a statistic to an individual case is a recognized academic no-no. Who knows what the circumstances surrounding Bristol’s pregnancy are?  They could have been related to carelessness, emotional difficulties, or any number of things. We’re all well aware of these if we watch Lifetime teen pregnancy specials. It wasn’t necessarily her lack of access to or misunderstanding of birth control. For all we know, in a family where the mother is the governor of the state, such issues could have been openly debated and discussed at great length.

Second, whether or not you agree with Palin about abstinence-only education, you have to wonder how many teen pregnancies are the result of pure ignorance about how condoms and birth control pills work, and how many are the result of other factors. Perhaps sex ed needs to present all the relevant facts, but also make teens feel more secure about waiting to have sex. Personally, I think the biggest factor pushing kids into sex is social pressure, not what teens learn in the classroom, so an education that makes abstinence appear normal – while still presenting factual information – might not be such a bad idea. But I digress.

So what does Bristol’s pregnancy say about Sarah’s family values, which evangelicals prize so highly in their candidates? I’d say that the Palins are doing the best they can – Bristol is marrying the father. I don’t see how an evangelical family would want otherwise for their children. They’re playing exactly by the books.

And look, I’m close to people who’ve dealt with this issue, and I know that they’re good parents. There’s a limit to how much you can control your child in this country, since we don’t lock teenagers up or put tracking collars on them (yet…). After a certain point, teenagers have the information they need and must make choices for themselves.

Finally, there have been great presidents with renegade children who have done worse, such as John Adam’s alcoholic son Charles, James Madison’s stepson John Payne Todd who was an “alcoholic, a gambler and a thief," and Ronald Reagan’s “renegade” daughter who posed for Playboy, to name a few. Hey, if this were England, the scandals of the nation’s leaders’ children would be the main income-generators of many well-read tabloids!