“Attacking” Sarah Palin’s Daughter

I received a text today from a dear friend, one supporting McCain. This friend is a great person, and a very astute individual. As we support opposite sides of this race, we’ve been known to taunt one another via both email and text messages. Today, I received a text from him, giving me grief for stooping low to “attack” Palin’s teenage daughter.

Not knowing whether the text was predicated off of what I shot to him yesterday via text or yesterday’s blog, I wanted to clarify something. In the event I didn’t state this clearly in my blog yesterday, my issue is not with an impregnated teen, or giving her grief. It’s that she comes from a family with a mother espousing a reduction in sex education in favor of abstinence education.

Governor Palin is an advocate of abstinence education, which is something I find too naïve and unrealistic to supplant informative sex education. It’s unrealistic and naïve, and in Palin’s advocacy of it; seemingly, she must have diluted herself into believing that her kids weren’t engaged in sexual activity. That’s just it, isn’t it?

The religious-right have always diluted their policy positions predicated on the instruction of values, which will keep teens from having sex or getting into drugs. Of course, for adults these same values mean full and gainful employment, passing these things on to children, and abstinence from substance abuse and anti-social behavior. Moreover, these values are also predicated on a divorce-free family, a stay-at-home mother and an SUV in the garage. Okay, perhaps the SUV is taking it a bit far, but is it?

The religious right’s promulgating this idea of their “values” saving civilization from itself are all well and good, so long as they do not preach hate or discrimination against those who perhaps have “alternative” lifestyles. Of course, we know better than this, right?

I just cannot yet square how and why we should take these folks seriously. Their policies do not work for them, in their own families, nor have they proven them elsewhere. For this daughter of Sarah Palin’s, a teen, she has the benefit of a mother who is the governor of her state. What about all of the underprivileged teenage women without good sex education or family support? What about these young women? They are told by the Right to have their children, and put them up for adoption, if they cannot afford to tend to them.
Of course, in the meantime, they might not have the health insurance to provide them healthy and good obstetrics. Beyond that, if they choose to keep their child, they would then need to support them, but receive grief from our society for needing assistance (not from the government, per se, but from those that lambaste “welfare moms). Lastly, when the kid is being brought up underprivileged, she or he is more prone to anti-social behavior, and on and on.

The point is simple, because not every teen mother has the benefit of having a family with her parents together, and a boyfriend marrying her, they should not all be subjected to education that clearly does not equip them with the tools to avoid unwanted pregnancy. So I am clear, it’s not to the detriment of this young woman being pregnant. It’s to the stupid naivety of her mother and her mother’s party. To make a simple cliché, they should practice what they preach, and for her daughter, while she might not agree with her mother, clearly she wasn’t in a household where she felt comfortable asking for a prescription for birth control—same story. Maybe Sarah Palin can learn from her daughter, and provide her other children with birth control, rather than leaving them without, rushing into shotgun weddings (as Palin is a big NRA member, maybe it’s a 7mm wedding…)