by hilzoy
Sarah Palin on her daughter’s pregnancy:
“”We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us. Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support.”
“Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family. We ask the media to respect our daughter and Levi’s privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates.””
I plan to honor that request. It’s easy, in the midst of a political campaign, to forget that the people involved are, after all, people. Some of them — Sarah Palin, for instance — place themselves under a media spotlight of their own free will. Others — her daughter, for instance — wind up there through no fault of their own. Imagine yourself in her position: there you are, seventeen years old, pregnant, unmarried. Maybe you understand what happened and why; and maybe your parents and friends do as well. But zillions of bloggers and reporters and pundits are about to make the most personal details of your life into a political issue, and they don’t understand it at all. And yet, despite that, they are about to use you and your unborn child to score points on one another, without any regard whatsoever for you and your actual situation.
I want no part of this. None at all. To those of you who think otherwise: that’s your right. But ask yourself how you felt when Republicans scored points using Chelsea Clinton, who didn’t ask to be dragged into the spotlight either.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s fair game to consider Sarah Palin’s statements about her daughter’s decision, and to compare them to her own views about abortion. That’s a story about whether or not Sarah Palin sticks to her beliefs when they affect her own family, not about her daughter. But it is not fair game to use her daughter, or any of her kids, as pawns in a political argument. To my mind, this extends to using her daughter as evidence that abstinence-only education doesn’t work: presumably, no one thinks that it works 100% of the time, and that’s the only claim to which this one counterexample could possibly be relevant. (That’s why God created large-scale studies.) Likewise, I think that arguing about whether Sarah Palin is a good mother is out of line: we have no idea at all what arrangements she and her husband have made for child care, how their relationship works, and so forth. Assuming that Sarah Palin would have to be her children’s primary caregiver is just sexist.
If the past is any guide, some people will respond to this post by saying that the Republicans would not hesitate to use Democrats’ teenage children to score political points. That may be. Three responses: first, so what? Just because they do it doesn’t mean that we should. Second, any argument for going there would have to assume that this would, in fact, be a political winner, and thus that not using it would entail some sort of political sacrifice. I am not at all convinced that that is true. Most importantly, though, there are some lines I’m not willing to cross no matter what the other side does.
Sarah Palin is a red herring anyways. She is a scent thrown in the opposite direction to get the dogs to chase her while McCain gets away! Keep Mrs. Palin on the sidelines and focus on McCain. He’s the one who will supposedly lead the country anyways, not Mrs. Palin.
Likewise, I think that arguing about whether Sarah Palin is a good mother is out of line: we have no idea at all what arrangements she and her husband have made for child care, how their relationship works, and so forth. Assuming that Sarah Palin would have to be her children’s primary caregiver is just sexist.
It’s also stupid. I think we–and I’m speaking for most humans here–try to use family decisions as predictors for what a politician would do in office, and that’s just a bad idea all the way around. We make different sorts of decisions in our relationships than we do when we’re in charge of something that has less personal meaning to us, whether we’re a presidential candidate or the assistant night manager at a Taco Bell. We’re more invested in the outcome when it’s personal.
Besides, there’s a far greater amount of information about her policy positions that’s relevant to whether or not she’d be a good V.P.–and it overwhelmingly points toward no. So why even go after the personal? It makes us look petty.
But there’s this I don’t understand.
Palin said in her statement that she hopes the media and public respect the couple’s privacy. That’s fair enough, certainly. But there’s a difference between what you can demand of others and what you might expect them to do.
To take the extreme and obvious example, Paris Hilton could ask for her privacy and even demand it, but she shouldn’t expect it.
Given this, I don’t understand why it’s not fair to say: if her daughter’s privacy was really that important to her, she shouldn’t have accepted the job. There are *plenty* of people in this country qualified to be VP.
Ara, that’s the best articulation of what I wanted to say on this matter! The daughter is very pregnant. And the way that our campaigns work, there is nothing but the brightest spotlight on the family in the running. And the bottom line is, knowing your daughter is 5-6 months pregnant, is now the best time to make the run for VP? How would it be possible that this wouldn’t become public? It just adds one more item to the unbelievably long list of bad bad judgement and poor vetting.
If the past is any guide, some people will respond to this post by saying that the Republicans would not hesitate to use Democrats’ teenage children to score political points. That may be. Three responses: first, so what? Just because they do it doesn’t mean that we should. Second, any argument for going there would have to assume that this would, in fact, be a political winner, and thus that not using it would entail some sort of political sacrifice. I am not at all convinced that that is true. Most importantly, though, there are some lines I’m not willing to cross no matter what the other side does.
The only improvement I could make on this statement is to replace “Democrats” and “Republicans” with “my side” and “the opposition”. The ethical principles are the same on either side of the mirror and one way I recognize principled conservatives whom I respect while disagreeing with them over policy details, is that they live by the same motto.
The ends do not justify the means. Bad means will inevitably corrupt good ends.
Enough said. Bronze it. Have it chiseled into granite. Put it in the FAQ.
We are defined as much by the choices we make in attempting to advance our preferred policies and candidates as we are but what those preferences are.
I’ve so far seen this story used to question McCain’s judgment and his vetting process, to question Sarah Palin’s commitment to (and the viability of) her hardline social conservative positions, and as a news peg to rebut Andrew Sullivan”s wilder fantasizing.
That doesn’t strike me as outside the realm of decency or intrusive upon Bristol Palin’s very legitimate claims to privacy, so I’m a little perplexed by the “I want no part of this” grandiosity here.
As a political matter, this story serves to starkly underline how little we know about Sarah Palin as a potential president. Which, in turn, makes Barack Obama and Joe Biden a bit more familiar and reassuring in comparison.
I think Bristol is off limits too. But what does strike me about this, is her mother and McCain’s camp throwing Bristol onto the national stage to squelch rumors that have been circulating in Alaska for several months. That’s shameless. The child deserved privacy, but instead she was outed by her own family.
Not just her daughter, but all your daughters.
Sarah Palin believes that teenagers shouldn’t be given the kind of sex ed lessons that mean they find out, ideally before they want to have sex, how to have sex without getting pregnant/getting someone else pregnant. Sarah Palin believes that the only thing schools should tell teenagers about sex is don’t have sex till you get married.
That’s Governor Palin’s public opinion. Her children are offlimits for public discussion: but Palin’s (and McCain’s) belief that the best way to keep teenagers “safe” is to keep them ignorant is not, I hope.
I would add too in response to the “So what? The Republicans do it” claim: If the sleaze and the invasion of privacy don’t stop you, the practicalities should: THIS STORY DOES NOT HELP US.
Let the Republicans implode without our help on this one.
I personally see no problem/connection between accepting the VP position and her daughter being pregnant. Take for example Hillary Clinton. Say, Chelsea were 10 years younger and turn out to be pregnant. Do you really assume that in that case Hillary should have abstained from running (No doubt the GOPistas would try to use it against her but they would anyway). I would not think that. It’s not the pregnant daughter running for president but her mother for VP. If candidate Palin would (ab)use her pregnant daughter for the campaign that would be of course a different matter.
By far the most important aspect of the Palin candidacy is the question whether she’s prepared to make decisions that could lead to American involvement in war, and could put America’s security interests in jeopardy–and the related question whether McCain asked and answered the foregoing questions as he should have.
Looking for evidence pertinent to answering these questions, a seventeen-year-old’s pregnancy doesn’t loom very large.
Hartmut,
Let me be clear. I am perfectly fine with a parent running for office with a pregnant daughter. My problem is that if you want to keep the pregnancy private and secret (which is what the McCain-Palin campaign is saying), then you can’t run for office. You can’t have it both ways!
Although I believe in privacy (even for politicians themselves, not just their children), that changes when one of the obvious talking point about this candidate is that “she talks the talk” and “she walks the walk”. Now, when you make your “walking the walk” in your private life a reason for your candidacy, it seems like it should be okay to ask whether “walking the walk” has worked out. Because if it hasn’t, maybe both the talk and the walk have problems.
Since there is a discussion about pregnancies in the Palin family anyway, the announcement seems to be the logical way and more like a “G0dammitt, yes she is pregnant now, so your conspiracy theory that my DS child is actually my grandchild just got blown out of the amniotic fluid. Now leave my family alone or at least out of the campaign!”
Classic flight forward defense.
And to add to my prior post, that doesn’t mean in any way that I would approve of trashing the daughter. In fact, I think it’s totally normal for teenage girls to have sex. But once someone’s pregnancy is announced, I can acknowledge it as a fact. I’m not judging the daughter at all – just the Mom’s “walk” and “talk”.
Hartmut: Say, Chelsea were 10 years younger and turn out to be pregnant. Do you really assume that in that case Hillary should have abstained from running (No doubt the GOPistas would try to use it against her but they would anyway). I would not think that.
No, not at all.
But I do think that the Palins ought to have realised that since Governor Palin’s public policy positions do not mesh with her private family circumstances (that is, she’s a politician who makes a thing out of asserting that the best way to stop teenage girls from getting pregnant is to tell them not to have sex), Governor Palin needed to think hard and carefully about how to break the news of her private family circumstances to the world, not just hope no one would find out till it became moot. I don’t say she shouldn’t have done it: just that she didn’t do it well.
Certainly dealing with the story in the limelight of the MSM would not be optimal. But it should be used to underline how differences in class and family situation make some of the policy prescriptions that Palin herself argues for (and, I suppose, McCain, but I’m not sure if he’s arguing for them, or simply pandering to them and would take any position that he thought would help him get into the White House) deeply discriminatory. If one agrees that privacy is some right, then you can’t argue for mandatory reporting of abortions, you have a hard time arguing for required parental approval for abortions. Privacy means you give up the right to question decisions, because you can say ‘I’m sorry, it’s none of your business’. How precisely does one square that with the anti-abortion positions that Palin herself holds? As a matter of electoral politics, stay away, but intellectual honesty should compel us to examine it.
Q: Sen. McCain, recently your Vice Presidential candidate said that she wasn’t that familiar with the Surge™ and had only read some vague newspaper accounts of it. How can she be ready to lead if she doesn’t know the basic details of one of the centerpieces of your campaign?
Sen. St. BBQ of the Holy POW: Well, as I’m sure you know, Gov. Palin has a lot on her plate these days, what with five children, including the youngest who is only five month’s old and has down’s syndrome, plus a pregnant teenage daughter, I’m sure you’ll understand if she’s had other things on her mind lately.
Q: But if so much of her time is taken up with family issues, how can she be an effective advisor and Vice President?
Sen. SBOTHP: How dare you question her commitment to her family and her relationship with her children!!
One other important point to make before anyone tries to use this to make points about sex education: they should try to confirm what was actually taught in Bristol Palin’s school. It’s always possible that they have a comprehensive sex education program in spite of her parents’ political beliefs. If that’s the case, using her school sex education to make a point about abstinence only could blow up in your face.
Observer: By far the most important aspect of the Palin candidacy is the question whether she’s prepared to make decisions that could lead to American involvement in war, and could put America’s security interests in jeopardy
Well, that question has already been asked and answered: no, she isn’t.
And I believe the only talking-point the GOP have to claim that she is is that “Alaska borders on Russia”.
Completely agree.
Obviously, if the original scandal were true, that would be a legitimate topic for discussion, but the simple fact of a pregnant teenager is not.
Let me put it another way. Both McCain and Palin could have taken action to spare this woman of even the possibility of this being an issue. And neither of them did. Instead, they passed the buck to unscrupulous reporters. Now Palin’s daughter is at the mercy of their judgment.
And, Harmut, of course we all agree with the general idea that there’s nothing wrong with running for veep if your daughter is pregnant. But not all pregnancies are the same. People and the press have a lurid fascination with teen pregnancies, with anything that tarnishes the image of people in power (or their family members). They just do. There’s a big difference between a pregnant (let’s say married) twentysomething Chelsea and a pregnant 17-year old unmarried Bristol.
I’m not saying these distinctions are fair or just. I’m just saying that they are there. It’s really in parallel to John Edwards’ affair. In an ideal world, it shouldn’t matter to his presidential aspirations. But we all know as a practical matter, it does. Given that it does, it was profoundly irresponsible and reckless for him to do what he did and nullify the efforts of all those people who worked for and donated to him. It’s hardly any kind of defense to say it shouldn’t matter.
And Sarah Palin, like John Edwards, has to make decisions in the world as it is, not in the world as it ought to be.
I think that arguing about whether Sarah Palin is a good mother is out of line: we have no idea at all what arrangements she and her husband have made for child care, how their relationship works, and so forth. Assuming that Sarah Palin would have to be her children’s primary caregiver is just sexist.
Thanks for this.
Also:
Barack Obama’s mother was an unmarried teenager too when she got pregnant, and was only 18 when she gave birth.
This doesn’t mean Barack’s mother couldn’t raise him properly because she was very young, or that his grandmother wasn’t a good mother because her daughter got pregnant when she was still a teenager.
By far the most important aspect of the Palin candidacy is the question whether she’s prepared to make decisions that could lead to American involvement in war, and could put America’s security interests in jeopardy–and the related question whether McCain asked and answered the foregoing questions as he should have.
Well put.
Secondarily, do her social conservative policy views put her far enough outside the political mainstream that a majority of voters should consider her ascension to the Presidency as an unacceptable result?
Nate at 538 put together a comparison of her policy preferences with polling on those issues and came up with a qualified “maybe” on that question. It depends a lot on the nuances of the issues in question (both with regard to her answers and how the issue polls with the voters), whether she is well outside the mainstream, or merely on one side of it while still “coloring inside the lines” so to speak. Judge for yourself.
I expect that there will be some hedging and clarifications in the future as she trims some of her views towards the political middle, especially on global warming and science education.
Yeargh. I just heard someone on NPR saying Palin was “much friendlier toward gay rights” than McCain. This seems to be a new talking point, though I’ve seen no evidence for it (other than her saying she has gay friends). Supporting amending the state constitution to deny health benefits to same-sex couples is not gay-friendly.
Ara: I’m fine with questioning Sarah Palin’s judgment on a lot of things, though in practice I think that questioning very personal decisions like how she deals with her children are likely to involve a whole lot of speculation and very little actual information.
All I’m saying is: her child did not ask for this. For all I know, she might have been thrilled that her mom would run for VP, or she might have been heartsick at the thought that her own private everything was about to be chewed over by the media. Sarah Palin might have considered her views before deciding, or she might not have. I have no idea.
For that reason, I’m leaving her out of it. Sarah Palin’s own willingness to act on her convictions when her family is involved is, as I said, a different matter: that’s all about Sarah Palin.
It is fair to say that the Palin family is a highwire act? She has five children. One is going to be deploying to Iraq. One is an infant with DS. And one is a pregnant teenager.
And she’s running for VP.
She really must be uber-Mom. My God.
Very very classy, Hilzoy.
I do think that it has to be both painful and embarrassing for Palin’s daughter to have this pregnancy suddenly be national news. And I realize it’s very suburban mommie of me, and perhaps sexist, but I do find it regrettable that Palin, knowing of the pregnancy, was willing to take a position that she must have realized would make a difficult time for her daughter much, much harder.
“Governor Palin’s public policy positions do not mesh with her private family circumstances (that is, she’s a politician who makes a thing out of asserting that the best way to stop teenage girls from getting pregnant is to tell them not to have sex)”
Ok, I missed where she asserted that it was an infallible way to stop teenage girls from getting pregnant.
Roger Moore: One other important point to make before anyone tries to use this to make points about sex education: they should try to confirm what was actually taught in Bristol Palin’s school. It’s always possible that they have a comprehensive sex education program in spite of her parents’ political beliefs. If that’s the case, using her school sex education to make a point about abstinence only could blow up in your face.
Well, not really. If their children went to a public school in Alaska, they got abstinence-only sex education, because Alaska has accepted the federal funding that means that’s what public schools are paid to teach – that’s according to Bush’s political beliefs, which he has imposed upon parents through the US, and which McCain plans to continue.
If the Palins chose to have their children go to a private school which didn’t take federal funding and which taught comprehensive sex education, then that says something else about the Palins. (We’ve had this before in the UK: Labour politicians who are all for state schools… but send their children to private schools. Never goes down well with the voters.)
We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby…
This is fair game. Does she believe in the right to choice or doesn’t she? And if not, doesn’t that place her far out of the mainstream in this country?
Since my research, concerning Black and Latino fundamentalist (and Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are interchangeable in this context), and their views on the state and social programs, it is obvious that there is a distinctive class difference between them and the white counterparts. The Bush years seemed to have added more Latino fundamentalists in the right-wing column, but not many and Black Fundies still do not trust white right-wingers. Latino and Black fundamentalists just do not view social programs and abortion the same way as White fundamentalists. And it seems to be more racial than class that is the break concerning social programs among most Fundamentalists is seen to break down by racial lines.
Palin, and fundamentalists like her, will never see their family dramas as symptoms of their character; however they will demand that others view these same types of families’ dramas as symptoms of the moral failures of the poor.
She can afford (financially) the dramas of teenage sex, and recover just fine.
Brett: Ok, I missed where she asserted that it was an infallible way to stop teenage girls from getting pregnant.
Actually, most supporters of abstinence-only education do claim that it’s the “only 100 percent effective method”. Whether Palin has ever echoed those words, I don’t know.
If it were up to me, there would be a total ban on even mentioning her for at least a week. That at the moment we talk about pretty nothing else (and Palin is also in the process of being inserted into the Gustav trouble), we are playing the GOP’s game.
Let the media dig into the Wassila archives and present their findings in a fortnight or so but now the target should be the GOP convention and the way both parties deal with the hurricane (Obama e.g. seems to react to it in an examplary way).
charles: This is fair game
No, it’s not. One would hope that the Palins would be proud of their daughter whatever her decision. It is not fair to Bristol Palin to pick this statement apart.
Hartmut: If it were up to me, there would be a total ban on even mentioning her for at least a week.
Fair enough, actually. I’ll take that pledge – till Tuesday 9th September.
Hilzoy: The reason I feel comfortable advancing the argument I have is:
(1) It really is about Palin and not her daughter.
(2) It seems to me that the basic facts of the situation have a kind of indefeasibility. She knew her daughter was pregnant. She knew there was a not insignificant chance that a hungry national press corps could make things difficult for her daughter. And she went along anyway. To take your example, even if her daughter were thrilled, does that really change Palin’s calculus? I’m not sure that it does. Presumably, Palin has a better since of the risks here than her daughter does. So: indefeasibility. That’s what I’m hanging my hat on.
I guess it could be argued that advancing this argument, as a practical matter, will make it more likely that others induce more mean-spirited arguments, and that, therefore, the most prudent policy towards it is an omerta. That may be true. And I won’t defend against that, except to say that it’s a criticism against advancing the argument, not against the point itself.
I feel so sorry for Bristol. I’m sure not only is she embarassed, she is also concerned that her actions will affect Mommy’s career. I bet that’s a comfortable family environment right now.
Poor girl, 17, baby, husband, and national press coverage. I would flee to Russia if I were her.
Let her be “she who must not be named or even mentioned” 😉
Poor girl, 17, baby, husband, and national press coverage. I would flee to Russia if I were her.
Little Diomede Island should be sufficient. 😉
Feh. If the point of releasing this information was to “knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.” We only need to know one thing: Bristol is five months pregnant. We don’t need to know:
(i) that “Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby, McCain aides said.”
(ii) that’s she’s decided to have the baby.
(iii) that’s she’s decided to raise the baby.
(iv) that she’s decided to marry the father.
(v) the father’s name is Levi.
Further, the McCain camp sure as fncking hell doesn’t tar Obama with this, such as with this nonsense like: “The despicable rumors that have been spread by liberal blogs, some even with Barack Obama’s name in them, is a real anchor around the Democratic ticket, pulling them down in the mud in a way that certainly juxtaposes themselves against their ‘campaign of change,”‘ a senior aide said.
So, we get to sit here and let the McCain campaign make at least three significant political points with this story, throw out a blatant lie that “the media to respect our daughter and Levi’s privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates“, and also accuse Obama of starting the rumors. Plus, they get an all purpose club to beat off any mistakes Palin makes from now until November.
Hilzoy this is the first left leaning blog I have come across that has (not saying there aren’t others-just the ones I routinely read) said “hands off, because it is wrong.”
I have see a few that said it was bad for their side, and I think they are right.
Just wanted to say hats off to you on this one. There are certainly issues you can raise about Palin’s fitness to be the VP nominee, but her children aren’t among them-or at least they shouldn’t be.
Bristol’s “decision”: If abortion is murder, what is there to decide on? Unless you are a mafia don who can get away with murder, people do not murder period.
It is not about the girl, it is about the politician.
The small-town, high-psychodrama implosion of this family is astounding. Hilzoy’s call for decency is certainly persuasive on philosophical level, but when so much of their campaign looks like it will be based on the in-touch-with-the-heartlandness of Palin and her family, how exactly does one attack their ruthless and ridiculous campaign without touching on the family’s affairs? Sullivan’s approach was lurid, and that Kos diarist was over the top, but come on. This family is one half public relations strategy, one-half crazy Christer, and one-half abuse of power. I know that’s one-half too many, but the cup overfloweth. THEY don’t draw a clear line between the powers of the state and the dramas of their family. So do we have to INVENT one out of a sense of propriety?
I for one have no problem pointing out that Sarah Palin and John McCain want to use the full power of the state, up to and including imprisonment, to force every single female citizen of the United States to make exactly the same ‘choice’ that Bristol Palin made. They want to post armed guards at the cervix of every single female citizen and yet we have right to discuss the utterly public consequences of their approach to humanity? Sure, we could make that point sans Bristol, but they haven’t really given us a choice on this matter. THEY made her the poster-child for their Xtianist dystopia. We don’t have to say anything about her personally, but to draw a bright line where none exists makes it impossible to take about it entirely impersonally also.
following up on Ugh’s comment, IOKIYAR should be changed to INHIYAR (It’s not hypocrisy if you are Republican)
In fact, now that I think about it more, we didn’t even have to know that Bristol was pregnant to knock down the rumors. All that had to be done was release Sarah’s medical records documenting her pregnancy, as Andrew Sullivan has been saying for the past few days.
Instead, they’re holding up Bristol and he soon to be husband as a shield. My freinds, that’s family values we can believe in.
Ara: yeah, I do see that it’s about Sarah Palin, not her daughter. That said, I think that in cases like this, it’s important to try to spin out as many different scenarios as possible for how the decision to run at a time like this might have played out, and what each would say about Palin’s ability to govern, and then ask yourself: do I really know enough to run with this?
It could be a selfish thing to do — though not more selfish than a lot of similar decisions. (Was Bill Clinton selfish to run, given that he knew that if he won, it would mean that his daughter would have to spend her high school dating years constantly accompanied by secret service? I mean that seriously: I think that that would be a Big Big Deal in high school. No privacy at parties. No going out with guys without a team of escorts who will probably tell your Dad everything, and will certainly intimidate the hell out of your dates. Your entire high school years spent not as, well, you, but as “the President’s daughter”. Ugh.)
It could be that she’s both in a deeply prickly and rebellious stage, and has made it clear that she doesn’t want her Mom to think of her at all, and will interpret any hesitation on her Mom’s part as condescension and patronizing and total disrespect, and will forthwith go into a state of war if she suspects any such thing.
It could be anything at all. We have no idea.
the sp*mbot code for that last comment was ‘sexsks’. I find myself wishing John Thullen would write something about this.
Sorry, should have been: They want to post armed guards at the cervix of every single female citizen and yet we have NO right to discuss the utterly public consequences of their approach to humanity?
I’ve seen no evidence for it
i think this is what people are talking about.
Gov. Sarah Palin vetoed a bill Thursday that sought to block the state from giving public employee benefits such as health insurance to same-sex couples.
In the first veto of an administration that isn’t yet a month old, Palin said she rejected the bill despite her disagreement with a state Supreme Court order earlier this month that directed the state to offer benefits to same-sex partners of state employees.
Advice from her new attorney general said the bill passed by the Legislature was unconstitutional, she said.
“Signing this bill would be in direct violation of my oath of office,” Palin said in a prepared statement released by her administration Thursday night.
not so much pro gay rights, as much as anti unconstitutional bills.
Governor Palin needed to think hard and carefully about how to break the news of her private family circumstances to the world, not just hope no one would find out till it became moot. I don’t say she shouldn’t have done it: just that she didn’t do it well.
I think Jes makes an excellent point here. It would have been wiser, I think, and quite possibly easier on Bristol, for Palin to have been forthright about this from the beginning. Possibly she could have said something about real families with real issues to deal with, etc.
Trying to keep it secret was futile, looks stupid, and can’t help but make Bristol feel that she has damaged her mother’s ambitions.
Loneoak: THEY don’t draw a clear line between the powers of the state and the dramas of their family. So do we have to INVENT one out of a sense of propriety?
Yes, we do.
I’m okay with talking about Palin’s decision to fly from Texas to Alaska while in labor with a DS baby who would need immediate medical attention as soon as born. Palin’s an adult politician who decided to accept the nomination for Vice President knowing this would mean every little decision like that would go public.
I’m okay with talking about Palin’s public support for abstinence-only education and removal of legal access to safe abortion. Those are issues I would have been raising anyway, given McCain is also pro abstinence-only education and anti-safe/legal abortion.
I’m also okay with Obsidian Wings having a flat rule that the Palin family are not mentioned. Husband or children.
I’m with hilzoy, leave the kids out of it.
Teenagers are curious about sex, and some have sex. Some of them get pregnant.
This happens whether they come from conservative homes or liberal homes, religious homes or non-religious homes, two-parent or one-parent homes, hetero-parent homes or homo-parent homes, rich homes or poor homes.
Teenagers have a biological bias toward fooling around, and many or most don’t have the maturity or life experience to have a clear and realistic understanding of the possible consequences. So, some of them, regardless of the quality of their parenting or education, are careless and get pregnant. It’s always been like that, and likely always will be.
Talking about which kinds of sex education are most effective in promoting a good understanding of sexuality, and in lowering teenage pregnancy, is an *excellent* topic for discussion.
That discussion should not use Palin’s daughter as a case study.
Really, please leave the kids and families out of it. There are exceptional circumstances where the behavior or background of family members might be relevant, but this is not one of them.
There is no upside, and it’s wrong. More accurately, there is no upside because it’s wrong.
I don’t care if the other side does it or not. That’s one of many reasons I’m not now, and never will be, on that side.
Thanks –
I’m sorry, this will be my last comment on this, but I’m thinking that if Palin does become veep, a reality show could be done. Titles might be
Beyond the Palins
Palin in comparison
The Veep life
This just seems entirely implausible to me. The line is logically possible, but practically specious. It presumes a bright line between a person and their family that just doesn’t exist.
How do you not mention her husband when he is at the center of Troopergate? How do you not mention her daughter who appears to have been treated like crap by her family? How do you not mention her sister, who may have been part of a conspiracy to commit perjury in front of the judge deciding her custody case (the judge threw out nearly all of their complaints against the husband Wooten)? It can be done in good taste, but to say it can’t be done at all doesn’t make much sense to me.
When a politician uses her (or his) kids as props for their agenda…uber wilderness mom, family values, etc, etc, etc…
but then asks for privacy for the same family when things don’t go according the the party platform…
She doesn’t get to have it both ways.
She announced the pregnancy. She and her political partner.husband knew their daughter was pregnant before she accepted the VP nod. Were they planning to keep her hidden during the campaign? They couldn’t possibly think it wouldn’t come out. So they made this decision knowing that their daughter’s situation would come to light.
I am sympathetic to the daughter’s plight. None of this is her fault. It lies fully in her parent’s lap. Are they and apparently Mccain so unsophisticated that running on a party platform that calls for abstinence only (and Palin has pushed this herself) with a pregnant teenager was NOT going to be discussed?
These same parents will trot out their kids for photo ops and talk about the little baby, to bolster their pro-life cred…
Again, they can’t have it both ways.
I would honor this request, but I found that Palin, too, attacks people viciously–or at least giggles when others do the attacking for her. I was appalled to hear this clip where Sara Palin laughs when a talk radio announcer calls one of her political rivals “a b**** and a cancer”. The woman referred to is a cancer survivor.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=sara+palin+bitch+cancer&hl=en&emb=0#
The Anchorage Daily news reported this on January 25th, 2008 http://www.adn.com/opinion/story/293639.html
I would honor this request, but I found that Palin, too, attacks people viciously–or at least giggles when others do the attacking for her. I was appalled to hear this clip where Sara Palin laughs when a talk radio announcer calls one of her political rivals “a b**** and a cancer”. The woman referred to is a cancer survivor.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=sara+palin+bitch+cancer&hl=en&emb=0#
The Anchorage Daily news reported this on January 25th, 2008 http://www.adn.com/opinion/story/293639.html
I would honor this request, but I found that Palin, too, attacks people viciously–or at least giggles when others do the attacking for her. I was appalled to hear this clip where Sara Palin laughs when a talk radio announcer calls one of her political rivals “a b**** and a cancer”. The woman referred to is a cancer survivor.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=sara+palin+bitch+cancer&hl=en&emb=0#
The Anchorage Daily news reported this on January 25th, 2008 http://www.adn.com/opinion/story/293639.html
Just when I thought I was going to have to rely on reruns of The Osbournes reality TV program, the Palin Saga splashes into view.
All I had to look forward to the next few months was more of Barak O-Blah-Blah’s sanctimonious yuppifying, Biden’s and McCains’ tongue-tied bloviations and boring eye-glazing speaking cadences.
But now, a possible super-star politician in the making: Bush-in-a-Bra, in an eight episode remake of Northern Exposure with a subsidiary Beltway location.
Yay! A trailer-trash presidential campaign, with all the fixin’s.
Thank you Invisible Lord Of The Universe… my prayers have been answered.
What is a mother of 5 (one child only a few months old )doing letting herself be put forward as a potential vice-president of the USA? Surely being pro-life is much more than being anti-abortion. Amongst other things it means being there to nurture and care for one’s children oneself and to help them achieve their full potential. It also means being there in a practical way to support a 17 year old unmarried daughter who is pregnant. As an older Christian woman I am not at all impressed by this lady’s priorities.
To those of you who think otherwise: that’s your right. But ask yourself how you felt when Republicans scored points using Chelsea Clinton, who didn’t ask to be dragged into the spotlight either.
Dang it hilzoy! You stole my point!
But, yeah, laying off the girl is not only the moral thing to do, it is, strangely enough, the politically astute thing to do. The Dems would have better luck sacrificing an intern to the generic bloodthirsty gods than going after a teenager who has sex.
I dated a teenage girl once upon a time (while I was a teen, mind you!), and the absolute last thing any girl wants is for people to be snooping about her, ahem, ‘business.’ I imagine lots of women can relate.
I remember how upset she was when some jerks asked her what we did together. Magnify that by 100x if her parents were to ask. Magnify that by 1000000x if they were to do a bit about here on SNL.
Long story short, don’t be a dick to teenage girls.
I question McCain’s judgement first, and then Palin’s judgement to accept the job.
Palin has her plates full in her family, an infant with Down Syndrome. A teen daughter pregnant, and many more that we still haven’t known. If you have so many problems in your family already, how can you handle the problems of the nation?
When you cannot even educate one teenage in your family on teenage pregnancy, how can you educate the teenages in the nation on the same issue?
What kind of role model you can display to our next generation? A working person who put her/his career first, then family second or last?
Privacy: Governor or VP candidate is public figure, when you accept the job, you also accept the fact that your background will also be in the public.
Voters, please think:
1. McCain is 72, if he dies, who is going to be the president of USA?
2. It is 3 AM and terrorist attack and Palin is changing a diaper or breast feeding or her daughter is in labor … What national security is that?
If Palin can be the VP, I think anyone including you and me can be the VP.
Palin family situation is not my business, if she will not be my VP.
cb: when you accept the job, you accept that your background will be public. For this reason, I am quite happy making Sarah Palin’s choices an issue. But her daughter, for all we know, accepted no job, and made no choice.
Also: “When you cannot even educate one teenage in your family on teenage pregnancy…”
Honestly: were you ever a teenager? Did you do everything your parents taught you, or even everything you knew you should do? I was a pretty sedate teenager myself, but even so, the answer was “of course not.” And for that very reason, the idea that anyone would blame my parents for each and every one of my own lapses in judgment — or even just the major ones — would have struck me as both absurd and insulting.
Assuming that Sarah Palin would have to be her children’s primary caregiver is just sexist.
I haven’t looked into this in awhile, but, in California, at least, I’m not sure the Courts agree with you, hilzoy.
and I’m quite sure old-fashioned feminist do not.
at one stage, the argument went that the courts ought to prefer to place the children of broken homes first with the mother.
I can’t help being fascinated by this, and I’ll admit to making a few Juno/Juneau jokes about it. More seriously, there are substantive aspects: Sarah Palin is praising her daughter’s decision in a choice she’d deny to others, and despite what Hilzoy says, and even though I realize anecdote is not the singular form of data, this is about as clear-cut an example against abstinence-only education as they come: intact family, good financial and educational circumstances, strong Christian family values – all defeated by simple human biology. All that said, I’m a pseudonymous blog commenter, which means I don’t have a lot of credibility at stake. I really don’t see much potential gain if more serious people were to go on about the Palins’ private lives – a category in which I’d place respectable pseudonymous blog headliners, let alone actual politicians. The important stories were and remain Palin’s squalid public record of abusing power and getting caught lying about it, and especially McCain’s having sewn up the nomination 6 months ago but deciding on a veep late and on a whim and despite knowing almost nothing about her. The American people are supposed to be using these few weeks to learn about who the veep nominee is, what she’s done, and what she believes. That John McCain is learning these things for the first time along with us is completely irresponsible.
Well said, Hilzoy, but the sad truth is that even if not one liberal-leaning blog ever mentioned Palin again, the McCain campaign would pump out press releases daily accusing the Obama campaign of sexism and exploiting the troubles of Sarah Palin’s family.
I do hope that Democrats stay away from this for both moral and pragmatic reasons, but I think I’m allowed to hypothesize on the electoral consequences. In that vein, I think the Republicans feel that unless that can make a martyr of Palin and her daughter ASAP, she’s just become a massive anchor to the McCain campaign.
And they have good reason to be very defensive about this, for the truth is that it is very bad news for them. This election will be won or lost in the suburbs of a few swing states, and there is no way teenage pregnancy plays well with suburban mom and dads in MI, OH, CO, FL.
Not to mention more than a few of the Republican rank and file who will be secretly turned off by this.
Finally, there is no way this story is over. Slimy journalists will be all over this. How old is the boyfriend? Is his family being paid off to marry her? I for one feel bad for a young girl given no choice not to have this child, or even to have it and put it up for adoption, because that would damage her mother’s political career. I also feel bad for the young lad who almost certainly will be forced down the aisle with a gun to his head.
Certainly I think Palin just turned off a great many middle class women who would have allowed their own daughters to make a different choice.
For those of you who are interested in the election rather than gossip, this should be the end of this discussion:
Obama: Palin’s family off-limits
and:
Of course, that’s what surrogates are for….
Two days ago I said in a comment here that Palin’s unfitness to be VP or president had nothing to to with being a woman and nothing to do with being a mother.
It’s more relevant than ever.
No main poster at this site and no Democratic campaign has ever touched the baby story — this one or the rumor. This news changes nothing politically.
McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, and particularly his having chosen her with almost no vetting and no real relationship with her, demonstrates his poor judgment, short-term thinking, and tendency to shoot from the hip.
The most consistent thread in Palin’s executive experience is her effort to abuse the power of her office to punish opponents.
She fired the police chief and librarian when she became mayor because they supported her opponent in the election, and was nearly recalled because of it.
As governor, she tried to have her brother-in-law fired from the state police and forced out the popular and competent official who refused to do so. She replaced him with a man who had to leave after two weeks, because she ignored evidence of his unfitness in the rush to replace Monegan.
She has portrayed herself as a pork-busting enemy of earmarks, but her history with the ‘bridge to nowhere’ and earmarks for Alaska is anything but that.
All of this could or should have been known to McCain, but he either didn’t make enough effort to find out or didn’t think it mattered. Well, it does matter. It matters that we stop electing people who abuse the power of their offices. It matters that we stop electing people who can’t be bothered with details and make impulsive decisions.
Forgive me, but I feel hypocrisy needs to be pointed out with the GOP. You can’t claim moral values and preach abstinence only programs when your own daughter (who you chose NOT to stay home and raise) is pregnant. I’m tired of playing nice and not pointing out the obvious. You know as well as I do that if this were an Obama daughter, we’d never hear the end of it. Never.
but I think this is beautifully put:
I plan to honor that request. It’s easy, in the midst of a political campaign, to forget that the people involved are, after all, people. Some of them — Sarah Palin, for instance — place themselves under a media spotlight of their own free will. Others — her daughter, for instance — wind up there through no fault of their own.
But for some reason, with this issue, I’m reminded of Senator Craig’s voting record against advancing civil rights for gays.
His homosexual activities become an issue because he took legislative actions to restrict the Freedom of openly homosexual citizens.
Something is not right there.
By the same token, Palin would deny knowledge to a post-pubescent female about the connection between reproduction and sexual impulses and then punish the innocent to lifetime of motherhood for an unwanted child.
Thus, if Palin had facilitated an abortion for her daughter, her doing so would very much be on the table.
Likewise, the fact that she condemns her daughter in this medieval manner tells us great deal about what a sanctimonious person she is.
that’s helpful.
Nice post, Hilzoy- props for standing w/ conviction.
Ugh @ 3:23PM raises the most telling point in all this IMO. I think this demonstrates that McCain has used this situation for his own political purposes, to reinforce his bona fides to social conservatives that ‘even the unwed teenage daughter of my veep has chosen to keep her child’. *And Palin has stood by and let him do so*. Would it have been at all a more judicious decision to remain silent about the daughter, and settle the Trig maternity question another way?
Let’s look at the official version of events.
Palin was eight months pregnant when her water broke while she was in Texas. She proceeded to give a 30-minute speech and then take a 10-hour flight back to Alaska, driving for an hour to the hospital where she gave birth.
At the same time, her daughter is missing several months of high school with mono.
Rumors circulate in Alaska that the baby is not actually Governor Palin’s, but her daughter’s instead. When Palin is selected as the Republican VP candidate, the rumors circulate nationally.
Palin then goes on to reveal that her daughter couldn’t have given birth 4 months ago, because the daughter was actually getting pregnant at that time (while missing school for having mono). Also, we should all respect her daughter’s privacy.
I agree that we should respect her daughter’s privacy. I also feel compelled to state my opinion that this official story is much crazier than any “conspiracy theory” being floated out there by “crazy” people, and that the key thing Palin wants here is to not have people investigate further. But so be it.
ask yourself how you felt when Republicans scored points using Chelsea Clinton, who didn’t ask to be dragged into the spotlight either.
Payback can be such a mother******.
some people will respond to this post by saying that the Republicans would not hesitate to use Democrats’ teenage children to score political points. That may be. Three responses: first, so what?
Here’s why it matters. There are Democratic politicians who are going to look at the smear jobs that Republicans do on the families of other candidates, and some of them are going to choose not to run for high office because they don’t want to put their families through that. That’s why the right wing does it. By following your advice we would guarantee that they can continue to use those tactics knowing that candidates on their side need never face the same response.
The easiest way to end the use of the tactic is to let the other side know that if they use it, the response will be brutal and effective, and done they same way they do it, by third party groups with no relation to the candidate so that he can remain clean and decry the tactic. They want to attack a candidate’s child? Two can play at this game. The only way to stop the use of the tactic by the right is to get better at it than them and let them sue for peace.
No main poster at this site and no Democratic campaign has ever touched the baby story — this one or the rumor. This news changes nothing politically.
It certainly does, there are many people out there that care about this stuff, it wouldn’t be in the news if they didn’t.
It shouldn’t change anything politically, but thems the breaks. There is NO WAY the McCain campaign knew about this beforehand. The entire point of the Palin pick was to shore up McCain, who is very dodgy on family values etc. (from a conservative POV), with the movement crowd.
In the final analysis, the Republican party has long politicised reproductive issues and family matters, so it is really that surprising that one of their first female figureheads has fallen victim to her own party’s unrealistic and sexist standards for female behaviour?
Off topic but while we are all talking about Bristol this is going on in St. Paul –
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
Forgive me, but I feel hypocrisy needs to be pointed out with the GOP. You can’t claim moral values and preach abstinence only programs when your own daughter (who you chose NOT to stay home and raise) is pregnant. I’m tired of playing nice and not pointing out the obvious. You know as well as I do that if this were an Obama daughter, we’d never hear the end of it. Never.
Look, I share your frustration. And while Hilzoy addressed it very well I’d like to quote ALeftTurn:
The ends do not justify the means. Bad means will inevitably corrupt good ends.
Enough said. Bronze it. Have it chiseled into granite. Put it in the FAQ.
We are defined as much by the choices we make in attempting to advance our preferred policies and candidates as we are but what those preferences are.
I hope that you grasp the wisdom and moral urgency in this but today I’ll just ask you to consider whether these means (picking on Palin’s daughter) are likely to achieve the ends that you’d like them to (electing Barack Obama). They are not, they will only help McCain; I think that’s pretty clear so I wish you’d find another outlet for your frustration, hell Cindy’s drug problem would be better territory than this.
I’m not sure that’s true, provided the teenage pregnancy occurs in a nice, white family.
ask yourself how you felt when Republicans scored points using Chelsea Clinton, who didn’t ask to be dragged into the spotlight either.
I don’t actually remember the R’s “scoring points using Chelsea Clinton” in any analagous way to what’s going on here. I do remember El Rushbo, and St. John Himself, making horrible cracks about her appearance during the notoriously difficult teenage years. (And the way she was looking on stage last week, I’d say she had the last laugh on both of them.)
i think a 17 year old is being forced into a shotgun marriage because of a procrustian ideology. and i think palin is running for the highest national office on a platform of forcing that same choice on girls everywhere. i’m sorry–i feel terrible for young bristol–but i don’t think it’s wrong to point out the obvious ramifications of palin’s policies.
“Given this, I don’t understand why it’s not fair to say: if her daughter’s privacy was really that important to her, she shouldn’t have accepted the job.”
I haven’t read further in comments to see responses to this, yet, but I’ll say right off the bat that my answer is because nobody should be forced to make career choices based on what other people say about someone who isn’t them.
More specifically, nobody should be forced to make decisions, or forecluded from political choices, based on what their relatives do, including their children.
I think that’s just wrong.
And that’s without even getting into how sexist it is to put that presumption on a woman because of what her children do.
People aren’t other people, people aren’t their relatives, people aren’t their siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, children, parents, or grandparents.
It’s wrong to act as if, or treat people as if, they are responsible for that which they are not.
Period, end of story.
And it’s particularly wrong to attack women for what they’re allegedly responsible for as mothers, because that’s specifically dependent on a bunch of sexist assumptions as regards what women must be held responsible for but men must not.
Lastly, “even” politicians are entitled to private lives. I thought Democrats believed in privacy rights, and human dignity, and the dignity of the individual, and protecting all those things.
Family business is nobody else’s business.
It’s just indecent to act otherwise.
Thank you hilzoy.
I don’t think some people understand the conservative base. Bristol is very likely to enjoy a two month baby shower. If you don’t support abortion, you usually support teenagers who get pregnant and not cast them out in the cold.
Growing up, I knew countless people who had married young and had babies before they were 20. All of them are still married to the best of my knowledge and their children turned out fine. Women have been having babies at 17 and 18 for all of human history.
The rumor that Palin had faked her pregnancy, using details of her labor to substantiate it, was probably the creepiest, most disgusting political rumor I have ever read. When I told my daughters about it, they agreed that it makes the rumors about Obama silly chitchat. The idea that a woman would have to prove she was the mother of her child, providing labor and childbirth records, as part of vetting for political office horrifies me.
I have always wondered which is worse–marrying the guy you love earlier than you might have wanted or being forced into an abortion because the guy you love has made it clear his support extends only to giving you a ride to the abortion clinic, if he is a gentleman.
If this were Obama’s daughter, he has made quite clear he wouldn’t want her to be “punished with a baby.” How much choice would she have?
But, yeah, laying off the girl is not only the moral thing to do, it is, strangely enough, the politically astute thing to do.
My cynical side sees this as pure political theater. Nothing Obama says or does can keep the press, especially the tabloids, from following this to the hilt. It’s great to talk about laying off Palin’s family precisely because he knows that it isn’t going to happen. By taking a swift and certain stand against it, he can take advantage of any dirt the National Enquirer can dig up while (hopefully) avoiding being lumped with the Enquirer in people’s minds.
As a complete aside, I think that people are missing the issue when they quote about Bristol deciding to keep her child. Even if abortion is off the table, there’s still a choice about raising the child herself or giving it up for adoption. When Sarah Palin is asked about this point, I’m sure that’s what she’ll say– and she’ll take advantage of the question to point out adoption as a moral alternative that makes abortion unnecessary.
At the end of the day, this is beautiful for the Dems. The daughter stuff will blow over, and the conspiracy theories are creepy for sure, but the one thing the general public will take away from this is that Palin is very conservative on social issues. This well make her at best useless in the swing state suburbs, and possibly cost McCain votes there. The enthusiasm of the movement conservatives doesn’t matter at all if the Dems win one of OH, VA, CO, or a couple of the smaller ones up for grabs – that is all Obama’s campaign cares about.
Moreover, as long as the news is gabbing about Palin, the McCain campaign is losing precious time. A VP that distracts from the campaign is a bad VP.
I think it all goes to prove the tired adage that the VP pick is the first important decision a presidential candidate makes. McCain picked his with very little research and analysis: ergo he’d be the terrible prez we all know he would be.
Republicans used the death of thousands of Americans on 9-11 to justify stupid wars and their grab for power…the drama within the Palin family pales in comparison.
“If you don’t support abortion, you usually support teenagers who get pregnant and not cast them out in the cold. ”
You know a different group of fundamentalist Christians than the ones I grew up with, who in fact did disown their daughters who became pregnant “out of wedlock” and “disgraced the family name.”
Thanks for this Hilzoy. And thank you Jes.
Got to pass on the rest of the comments.
The rumor that Palin had faked her pregnancy, using details of her labor to substantiate it, was probably the creepiest, most disgusting political rumor I have ever read.
You should get out more.
Family business is nobody else’s business.
It’s just indecent to act otherwise.
The idea that a woman would have to prove she was the mother of her child, providing labor and childbirth records, as part of vetting for political office horrifies me.
I understand the human fascination with gossip, but I agree wholeheartedly with Gary and Redstocking Granma and of course hilzoy who started this thread pointing in the right direction and seemingly in vain.
This whole episode is just revolting. It makes my skin crawl reading some of this speculation and gossip regarding the private lives of the Palin’s. I don’t care if they may or may not have chosen to expose themselves to this scrutiny. Stop it, please; you only lower yourself by wallowing in this story.
In Obama’s speech on Thursday, he took a swipe at the GOP for making “a big election about small things”. Stop emulating them. It is disgusting, it is counterproductive, and it is unnecessary, and it runs counter to what Obama himself has asked (in the quoted article I posted above) everyone to do.
There is more than enough to talk about from a policy standpoint. If you want to attack John McCain’s judgment for picking Gov. Palin, there is plenty to discuss in terms of the seeming impulsiveness of his decision, the extraordinarily small circle of people involved, their failure to fully vet her from a strictly policy-political standpoint (without bringing the family into it), and so on.
When Obama says “we are better than this” (referring to the Bush administration and the last 7 years), I believe him. Let’s start showing how we can be better, rather than just talking about it, starting with right here, right now.
Jes said it best: “Her children are offlimits for public discussion: but Palin’s (and McCain’s) belief that the best way to keep teenagers ‘safe’ is to keep them ignorant is not, I hope.”
Not supporting sex ed in 2008 is another example of bad judgement from the McCain camp — whether Palin’s daughter were preggers or not.
—
Codpiece: “Forgive me, but I feel hypocrisy needs to be pointed out with the GOP. You can’t claim moral values and preach abstinence only programs when your own daughter (who you chose NOT to stay home and raise) is pregnant. I’m tired of playing nice and not pointing out the obvious. You know as well as I do that if this were an Obama daughter, we’d never hear the end of it. Never.”
I had thought the same thing if Obama’s oldest were 17, not 10, and if she were pregnant: The End. No more Obama. But I think he would have had the good sense not to run in such a crucible if that were the case.
—
Great point by Ara: “And Sarah Palin, like John Edwards, has to make decisions in the world as it is, not in the world as it ought to be.”
—
I was wondering if Bristol, Palin, Levi and the baby will live in the vice president’s quarters on the taxpayer’s dime. Or will Levi have to fend for his own family like so many in our kids-having-kids society?
—
I wish Chelsea had been more in the spotlight — she was the only controversy-free thing about the Clintons, and still is.
Redstocking: If this were Obama’s daughter, he has made quite clear he wouldn’t want her to be “punished with a baby.” How much choice would she have?
Wow. So, it’s OK to attack the children of Democratic politicians? Didn’t think the hypocrisy would come out so soon.
Oops, that was me.
Italico delendi!
Gary: “Family business is nobody else’s business.
“It’s just indecent to act otherwise.”
It’s great being a member of the High Road Party, especially when the Republicans have been using “family business” — well, family values — as their primary platform for a generation.
Those who live in glass houses . . .
Sure, Bristol should be left alone. But we’re already talking about it. Even if just to say “Bristol should be left alone”, you can bet that will be more than enough for right-wingers to say we give it a loathsome amount of attention.
I’m more concerned about McCain. He could not have known about this. Palin’s appeal is to the right-wing evangelical base, but they are precisely the ones that will be most offended by this.
Some 25% of Americans have indicated they won’t wote for a woman for president. I bet at least some of those are fundamentalist bogeymen from the pro-choice horror cabinet: People who really think a woman’s place is in the home, that women have no business being in charge of anything important, neglecting their family etc. As a woman with a career, Palin was already not high on these people’s list. With this “scandal”, it probably dropped even lower.
Moreover, as long as the news is gabbing about Palin, the McCain campaign is losing precious time. A VP that distracts from the campaign is a bad VP.
I’m not so sure about that byrningman. The McCain campaign is going to use Palin as cover, they’ll try to get media sympathy for her. All the while, we lose the chance to define McCain (and its harder to define Palin if the media is in love with her and her story).
The Dem convention was great because, amoung other things, we focused on defining McCain as a 3rd term Bush. Any chance we lose to keep up that message is a good thing for McCain.
So I don’t necessarily disagree that her ultra-conservatism will turn off a lot of moderates in the suburbs, and that may well be a great benefit. I’m just a little worried that we lose valuable time to hang McCain by Bush’s record.
Palin’s negatives may well make up for lost time, though, but I don’t feel comfortable speculating on that until we see some polls in the next couple of weeks. Until then, though, we define the opposition as best we can, despite not receiving as much coverage as we’d like.
(On reading this, I say ‘we’ a lot. By that I mean Dems, if it wasn’t clear.)
I’m okay with talking about Palin’s decision to fly from Texas to Alaska while in labor with a DS baby who would need immediate medical attention as soon as born. Palin’s an adult politician who decided to accept the nomination for Vice President knowing this would mean every little decision like that would go public.
Say what? Wasn’t she carrying a DS FETUS? And weren’t you the person who felt that it was always a womans choice and the fetus/baby didn’t count till it left the womb?
She wasn’t in labour (with a fifth child on a flight that long it would have been born on board if she had been in labour). And if they had an ultrasound in the 20th week (I thought that was standard in the US too, if you had health insurance?) they’d known if there were any problems that had to be dealth with immediately. Even hart defects and bowel seperations don’t have to be operated upon within hours.
The mortality of DS children is higher, but that is not around birth, but in the first days after AFAIK.
I had my kids at 36, 38 and 40 so I knew there was a higher chance at a DS kid. I didn’t test for it, because I would not have aborted for that reason. Friends of mine did, these things are personal choices. In the Netherlands the rate of Downs is increasing, mainly due to the increasing age of mothers. But the percentage of >36 who want tests decreases and the people who test positive choose to not abort in about 30% of the cases. Having an environment where there is enough support appearantly has more impact than people assumed.
Introducing yourself and your family is normal for US political candidates. Less so in my country, we hardly see spouses and kids – but the spouses of our politicians usually have/keep jobs of their own. I guess that is the advantage of having Royals to perform a number of the representative tasks. hey, we even have politicians who give birth or become fathers whilst being the leader of their political party.
Going after the kids is despicable. No person with a sense of honor would do so. I’m glad Hilzoy wrote a post about it, I’m unpleasantly suprised that it is not clear for everybody why one should leave them alone.
FWIW, I too, like liberal j, have been wondering what John Thullen would say about this and all matters Palin related since McCain made his pick.
Talk about a pick that has changed the nature of the debate.
Drew is so right: “The McCain campaign is going to use Palin as cover, they’ll try to get media sympathy for her. All the while, we lose the chance to define McCain (and its harder to define Palin if the media is in love with her and her story).”
You can add that a shortened convention plays right into their favor — they did not have a George Bush figure to bash around like the Dems.
Instead, I heard John King just report on CNN that they’ve already raised 1.8 million in hurricane relief.
They look like heroes.
I’m with d (or was it jes?) here: Redstocking Grandma’s first two comments were fine, though my take might differ and the second one came on a bit strong. The willful misreading in the third one, used to misrepresent Obama’s pro-choice position as being a must-abort position, was completely unacceptable.
Redstocking Grandma — “The idea that a woman would have to prove she was the mother of her child, providing labor and childbirth records, as part of vetting for political office horrifies me.”
Agreed. The irony here which should probably be pointed out is that Palin’s pro-choice fellow travelers would have no such qualms if the woman in question had lost the baby at any point in her pregnancy.
Not all privacy is equal, I guess.
It’s great being a member of the High Road Party, especially when the Republicans have been using “family business” — well, family values — as their primary platform for a generation.
And do you admire them for doing that? Has it helped them to win your vote? Or does the hypocrisy of it make you less sympathetic to their arguments? Why should the Dems follow them down this road? Especially now of all times when the issues appear to favor us with the majority of the electorate.
Each election is only about 1 or 2 major themes, so far as the swing voters are concerned (remember “it’s the economy, stupid” from 1992). What do you want this election to be about:
Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
The economy
Energy policy
Health care
Teen pregnancy and family values
If you can only have 2 out of that list, which 2 do you want dominating conversation for the next 2 months? Not just with respect to if Obama can win, but in terms of what sort of focus the next administration has.
Hilzoy: “But her daughter, for all we know, accepted no job, and made no choice.”
Sorry, this is not ONLY Sarah Palin’s choice. Why on earth her whole family stood on the stage, in the public if it is only Sarah’s choice? This is all “family” about. Her action and decision affect her family, it comes in a bag. She should have discussed all the issues and consequences they would have within her family, she should consider her daughter’s feeling before she rushes to accept the offer. She should consider more of her DS baby before she accept the job.
“…this is about as clear-cut an example against abstinence-only education as they come: intact family, good financial and educational circumstances, strong Christian family values – all defeated by simple human biology.”
We have been making too many excuses for our wrong-doings, and we let our mistakes repeat, we refuse to learn wiser. We cover-up our wounds with bandages, and even pretty and prettier bandages. (No wonder fancy bandages is a good business :-)) This is like how Sarah Palin handles her teen pregnant daughter. Yeah, the outside bandages are pretty (potential 2nd family of US), but the inside wound is getting rotten and infected.
By all means, it’s all about Sarah Palin, not her daughter(I don’t mean her daughter was right, she will get her own consequence anyway!). It’s all about Sarah’s choice and decision. She is making her family go through all these!
Marbel: She wasn’t in labour (with a fifth child on a flight that long it would have been born on board if she had been in labour).
You’d think so, wouldn’t you?
But Sarah Palin says she was in labour when she boarded the plane, and after all, she should know.
Say what? Wasn’t she carrying a DS FETUS?
Yes. I misspoke.
And weren’t you the person who felt that it was always a womans choice and the fetus/baby didn’t count till it left the womb?
Yeah, I think a woman retains the right to make medical decisions whether she’s pregnant or in labour. I also think that when a woman realises she is going into labour, it’s a really damned stupid decision for her to decide to board a plane for an 8-hour flight in order to have the baby in Mat-Su Regional Medical Center instead of the nearest hospital with a decent pediatrics department in Texas.
I wasn’t aware that “s/he did it first!” was an argument grown-ups used.
I do recall “two wrongs don’t make a right” as a statement both correct for children, and adults, though.
I also think of Joseph Welch.
I’m not so sure about that byrningman. The McCain campaign is going to use Palin as cover, they’ll try to get media sympathy for her. All the while, we lose the chance to define McCain (and its harder to define Palin if the media is in love with her and her story).
I dunno, the Dems get to keep to the same message, which has the benefit of also putting them above the tabloidish fray. Besides, this is the Reps convention week, so they should be hogging the news anayway. If the convention is sharing the spotlight with rampart discussion about the VP’s personal life, that VP is a liability.
Plus, Palin has a major credibility gap. As long as the discussion is about her personal life and not her opinions on energy/the economic/whatever she’s not making any ground in making up the ready-on-day-one gap.
Lastly, the Obama campaign’s motto is ‘no drama Obama’ – hence the Biden pick. I can’t help but seeing the net result of McCain’s VP pick that the Obama-Biden ticket is seen as the safer choice.
Next week I doubt we’ll care about Palin’s daughter (I personally don’t in any case), but it’s a lousy VP pick if you spend convention week defending the choice.
And, really lastly, it’s a certain corollary from the focus on Palin’s family life etc. that the general public will absorb her stance on social issues. I can’t see the average person’s impression on Palin in a month’s time being about her energy policy rather than her social policies, and those social policies are net vote losers in the states that matter in November.
A sad aspect about all this, is that it looks to me like Palin is well on her way to become a very polarising figure – as is H. Clinton. This makes me wonder whether high-profile women in American politics inevitably become polarising. (But I’m not sure if they genuinely are more polarising than some of their male colleagues). I’m just throwing that out there as an open-ended musing.
Gary Farber:
I see where you are coming from. Certainly nobody should be *forced* to make decisions based on what their relatives do. I agree with that principle. But nobody is compelling Palin, and I was suggesting no such thing. My argument is only that if she thinks the dangers to her daughter are sufficiently grave, then she ought to do it out of regard for her daughter, not that someone ought to have compelled her to do it.
My point was just this: McCain exposed the daughter to risk by choosing Palin even after he found out about this. Palin exposed the daughter to risk by accepting it despite her daughter’s situation. If there happens to be a media circus around this, then their actions are partly accountable for it.
As sure as the sun rises, you just know the media’s going to go nuts over an abstinence-only VP candidate who has a pregnant teenage daughter.
Left Turn:
Just to be clear, I was calling my party, the Democratic Party, the High Road Party — I don’t think I have it in me to be a member of a party that preaches family values yet doesn’t always practice them (and — oh, never mind, when we don’t; give us our privacy).
Or a party that is against gay rights but gives us a war-hungry vice president whose daughter is gay.
What rich irony.
I wasn’t aware that “s/he did it first!” was an argument grown-ups used.
Responding to an attack with another attack, innocent bystanders be damned, is, in fact, something grown-ups do, and if you are going to be involved in politics, war, bar fights, or love affairs, you probably need to learn to deal with it.
byrningman- Her hogging of convention week would normally hurt pretty badly, but considering Gustav, I don’t know that she’ll be a big distraction this week. And, as you said, the deal with the kids will probably blow over by next week.
I think the problem is that, by then, McCain/Palin will have established their narrative on her and I don’t trust the media to shake things up very much. That leaves us with a tougher time defining Palin which is probably the key to getting the moderates to reject her.
I hate to say it, but OCSteve may be right about Palin being a good pick, as long as their campaign beats us to the punch (which timing and events seem to make more likely).
BTFB- I’ve had a crappy day, but your comment cheered me up tremendously. I like being ‘so right.’ ^.^
Of course she brought her daughter into the spotlight, which is just selfish, if not a bit lunatic. Bristol has become the most famous unwed teenage girl in the world. Thanks, Mom. We should all have parents who put family first in such a fashion.
THE fundamental question this circus episode raises is one of judgment, both from Gov. Palin and from Sen. McCain.
Clearly, once McCain offered, and Palin accepted, the VP nomination, Bristol Palin was sentenced be the subject of supermarket tabloid covers, a la Jamie Lynn Spears.
One would think that the first question Bristol’s pregnancy would raise would be “What effect will national media attention have on her?”, followed closely by “What effect would this have on Gov. Palin’s ability to focus on the responsibilities of the VP’s office?”
P
I don’t get the analogy between Palin’s daughter and Chelsea Clinton. What did Chelsea ever do that put into question the public expressed opinions of either of her parents in the spotlight?
It’s true that Palin’s daughter should not be attacked in any way shape or form. But, I don’t see anyone ridiculing the young lady. I see people wondering if Palin is being duplicitous again just as she has been in her lies regarding the “bridge to nowhere”, pressuring officials to fire her ex-brother-in-law and her exploitation of Hillary’s name.
Gary,
Re: “Family business is nobody else’s business. It’s just indecent to act otherwise.”
I mostly agree with you, but I also think it’s natural for people to have strong reactions to Palin’s decision to run for VP under these circumstances.
As a father with teenage daughters, I had an immediate visceral reaction when I heard the news about Bristol’s pregnancy. I wondered: How could Sarah Palin do that to her daughter? Now, this may not be rational, and it may not even be fair, but I think it’s an understandable reaction. The parental instinct to protect one’s children is very strong. One shouldn’t always obey that instinct — in fact, love for our children sometimes requires that we fight it. Nevertheless, I find it hard to fathom how anyone could expose their pregnant teenage daughter to the media wolves like that. I’m not saying that it’s objectively wrong to do so. I’m saying that it’s hard to square with my own sense about how a loving parent behaves. I wouldn’t even mention this except that the McCain campaign is so clearly holding up Palin as a standard-bearer for family values. Her behavior in this instance certainly doesn’t reflect my family values.
In the end, though, I think that this is a huge distraction from far more substantive issues. I’m much more concerned about her complete lack of national security credentials, or about the way she handles power (Troopergate), or about her positions on the environment, choice, and creationism. These are the things we should focus on.
Okay quick question. When the family press release announces that this was Bristol’s decision, are we allowed to point out that if her mother has her way, teenagers like Bristol will not *have* a decision to make, even if the pregnancy was the result of rape?
Because right now? It sure looks like it’s all right to use little Trig as a campaign prop to promote your pro-life values, but it’s absolutely off-limits to mention that your extremist views on abortion, birth control, and abstinence-only education might not have worked out that well in your own household.
Yes, it’s a horribly difficult circumstance. And only one person is responsible for dragging Bristol Palin into the larger spotlight. Her mother.
No good will come of picking through the details of Palin’s daughter’s situation.
She’s a teenage girl. She and her boyfriend had sex. She got pregnant. They’re going to get married.
There’s nothing more to say about it. It’s their business. We have no — absolutely no — insight into the dynamics of how they arrived at that decision, and we have no — absolutely no — right to have any such insight.
That’s what “pro choice” means. People get to make their own choices. They may make choices we would not make. C’est la vie.
Palin and her family owe the rest of us exactly zero explanation of how the situation came about, exactly zero details of the nature of the relationship between Bristol and the father of the child, and exactly zero anything else. They’ve provided a perfectly adequate amount of information about the situation.
It doesn’t make Palin a hypocrite if her daughter got pregnant, any more than it makes an atheist a hypocrite if their kid becomes a priest. Or any more than it makes an ethical person a hypocrite if their kid robs a bank. Teenage girls get pregnant all the time, and it is their and their family’s prerogative to decide how to handle it.
You can’t hold people responsible for every thing their kids do. You ought not publicly crucify kids for the public positions their parents take. It’s wrong.
Please give it up. There are more than enough issues of real, significant, public substance to engage McCain and Palin with. The lurid speculation about whether Palin’s kid is really hers, and the tongue-wagging about Bristol’s pregnancy, are, and ought well be, beside the point.
They are not our business.
I disagree with conservatives about a lot of things but I don’t really hold much animosity toward them. I do hold enormous animosity toward the Republican party of the last 40 years.
The reason is that they have demonstrated, over and over and over again, that they are an unscrupulous, amoral, repugnant crew of whores for power.
Let’s not take that path. OK?
Leave the families out of it. It’s indecent.
Thanks –
Jeebus the hypocrisy of this sh!t coming from a Rove disciple is ridiculous:
Senior McCain adviser Steve Schmidt said the campaign decided to issue a statement about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy to help quell those Internet-based rumors, which he called “disturbing, nasty smears.”
“We had hoped this could be an issue that was private, that the family could deal with this issue privately,” Schmidt told a large group of reporters who surrounded him at the convention here shortly after the statement went out.
“It used to be that a lot of those smears and the crap on the Internet stayed out of the newsrooms of serious journalists. That’s not the case anymore,” Schmidt said. “It goes right from the Internet, right to the newsroom and right to us, and we’re compelled to respond to it.”
Because telling everyone the daughter was pregant was the only to dispel the rumors eh? (and, the private family issue aside, I ain’t feeling much sympathy for the McCain campaign having to respond to nasty internet rumors. Wah.)
Agreed.
Darn it, I’m still getting an error message from Typepad unless I break this comment up. WTF?
At 1:56 PM I received an email saying:
To be continued.
Pt. II:
I never took down the “Donate to the Red Cross” link in my blog header since Katrina, myself; didn’t seem any reason to.
Morality aside it is stupid to for Deomcrats make an issue of the daughter. Any issue at all. It is smarrt but profoundly cynical for the Republicans to make an issue of her, which they are.
How did this story get out in the first place? According to mahablog the rumor of her baby appeared in modified form all over RIGHTY blogs–they were pretending to be in all outraged about left blogs spreading rumors but they were busy getting the word out themselves.
It’s classic Rove: cover up the real crime by getting your opponent to attack on the basis of something that can be refuted.
In this case the first step was to start a rumor about the daughter’s pregnacy, the next step to accuse the left in general and Obama in particular of spreading the rumor, then have a nice media event depicting your candidate as the injured victim of malicious rumors.
Thus immunizing her from future accusation which are true.
So I don’t think that the daughter or the other kids should be used as a jumping off point for any discussion, any discussion at all.
Agreed with Ugh.
These dudes have a lot of nerve! With the endless “secret muslim,” “whitey tape,” “birth certificate” crap they’ve been peddling for the last six months.
I’m going to disagree with most of you here. America politicians get on stage with their families and use their families as evidence for their values and characters. That makes their families campaign operatives and campaign operatives are fair game.
Kerry has his wife and his kids give a speech about his record and why people should vote for him based on the qualities they knew of him personally. That makes counter evidence legit. Governor Palin has played up the mother angle. And she most certainly has played up the family values angle.
(Oh and BTW I am voting for McCain/Palin, so I’m not saying this just because I’m a liberal).
Here’s the point you’ve missed (and others may have pointed it out, as well). Palin and her right wing ilk beat the drum about personal responsibility and that it’s a character fault of parents when their children screw up. So, the issue becomes one of how Sarah’s character should be defined in her own (and the conservative Christian right’s)terms.
Time and again we have witnessed the right wing hypocrites launch attacks and pass laws penalizing individuals who are gay, have drug/alchohol issues, or have unplanned/unwanted pregnancies (especially when unmarried). But when one of their own indulges in such a transgression, suddenly the issue becomes one of compassion and forgiveness, and fawning over the “courage” it takes to publicly acknowledge the situation.
The gloves must come off in this battle. Sarah Palin put Bristol in the spotlight, and it is Sarah Palin who needs to be held accountable. I only hope the poor girl isn’t being forced into an unwanted marriage in order to help her mother save face.
Sarah Palin is the legal guardian of her 17-year-old. Knowing full well her family’s situation, she then decided to thrust her family under the lime-light of the national attention. If she wants to protect her children, there are lots of things she could do, one of them being turning down the VP-slot. Or she could choose to keep ALL of her children out of the lime-light. The fact remains that she IS trying to score political points with her son going to Iraq and her new-born with Down syndrome. However, the one daughter that could prove to be more of a political liability all of a sudden DESERVES respect and is entitled to her PRIVACY? Give me a break!
Harley:
it’s absolutely off-limits to mention that your extremist views on abortion, birth control, and abstinence-only education might not have worked out that well in your own household.
This is a bit silly. No policy is going to work the way you want it 100% of the time. Palin’s daughter is just one data point among millions. If she had made it to this point without getting pregnant, would you have conceded that Palin’s views on abortion, sex ed, etc., were therefore justified?
It’s ironic that Palin’s daughter became pregnant, but there’s really no larger meaning to it re social policy. And using this to bash Palin will no doubt be just as helpful and effective as Kerry’s bringing up Mary Cheney in the 2004 debates.
So to update the new proverb:
People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones at the people throwing stones at them from their glass houses?
Epic fail.
In the conservative Christian culture, this is what girls who get pregnant DO. Trying to make it Sarah Palin’s decision is a non-starter.
Ain’t no mileage here. I’m astounded that anyone with brains think there is any.
“If this were Obama’s daughter, he has made quite clear he wouldn’t want her to be ‘punished with a baby’.”
No, he didn’t. Here is exactly what he said, in off-the-cuff, rather than prepared, remarks:
Video.
“If they make a mistake.” You didn’t include this. This is a major distortion of someone’s words. If you couldn’t be bothered to check yourself, it was irresponsible to not do so before making your claim. Please don’t engage in that sort of irresponsible distortion. Thanks.
Let’s not forget that in South Carolina in 2000, during the first Bush Presidential campaign, someone (allegedly Carl Rove) planted the rumor that John McCain had a black child. Republicans set the precedent for bringing family into campaigns.
We should leave Palin’s family alone. We should not question Palin’s beliefs as they relate to the Presidency and policy.
First, is she qualified. She has no experience that suggests that she is even remotely qualified. The comparison to Obama is absurd. Harvard Law, top 5%. Editor of Harvard Law review, community organizer, state govt ( in a much, much larger state with more complex issues), and US Senate. Most importantly, he has been a national figure for over 4 years an has spent 18 mo. on the campaign trail debating, crafting policy, and organizing to take and and beat the Clinton machine. He is qualified, which doesn’t mean he will be good, just that he has the tools for the job.
Palin and the Evangelicals do not understand that the founding fathers were far from evangelicals and they were fallible. Many were deists, Jefferson was hated by the church and returned their disdain. they did not believe in a govt. sanctioned religion and make no mistake, that is what the evangelicals want. They don’t want freedom to practice, they want all to practice their flavor or Christianity and they want it to push public policy, education, and to be part of our everyday lives.
What does this lady bring to the ticket or add to McCains ability to run. Nothing, she has a uterus and some will vote for that. She is one of the evangelicals and they don’t care about competence, just that she is one of them. These folks still mostly support Bush despite his disastrous 8 years.
She believes in evolution and can’t see why it isn’t science, she is against stem cell research, and she lacks any understanding of international relations or even a basic understanding of other cultures. That didn’t work so well last time.
Even leaving the daughter completely out of it, I think the entire episode of Palin getting on the airplane while “in labor” speaks volumes about her regard for others. Kinda like Romney’s putting the dog on top of the car for vacation. As we all know, there’s two explanations for Palin’s quick trip home: (1) She wanted to deliver her child in Alaska, and (2) she wanted to cover up her daughter’s giving birth. For me, #2, while far more juicy, would speak far better of her character than #1 does.
Just think of how she disregarded – if not just the interest of her unborn son – the interests of the other passengers and the airline itself. And for what, just so she could deliver the baby in Alaska? This may not be so self-centered and self-indulgent as the lawyer who flew home with infectious TB, but it’s pretty close. I have to hope that when people hear about this it makes them wonder just what sort of person she is.
It is not unusual to expect that our candidates be above reproach in their personal as well as professional lives (Despite McCain’s extra-marital affair, do you think John Edwards would be a viable candidate at this point had he received the nomination?).
If a candidate for any office has committed their life to excelling in a particular field we expect them to do it well.
Mitt Romney (despite being a father of five) has committed his persona to being a business executive, and he was ultimately very successful at that.
Joe Liberman committed his career to being a total douchebag, and his rewards are being reaped.
Sarah Palin, by having five children, starting her political career in the PTA, and running on a “family values” platform, chose parenting to be a major part of her persona, and if we can’t evaluate her on her parenting skills, then can we not evaluate Romeny on his executive skills?
The only thing this story has brought to light is that, ultimately, Sarah Palin (and her family) is very average. And average is unacceptable when it comes to the Vice Presidency, much less a possible presidency.
Jeffrey Ellis: Time and again we have witnessed the right wing hypocrites launch attacks and pass laws penalizing individuals who are gay, have drug/alchohol issues, or have unplanned/unwanted pregnancies (especially when unmarried). But when one of their own indulges in such a transgression, suddenly the issue becomes one of compassion and forgiveness, and fawning over the “courage” it takes to publicly acknowledge the situation.
Yes. That’s because they’re utter and complete scumbags.
Here’s the point you’ve missed (and others may have pointed it out, as well).
Not missed. Just not scumbags.
Palin and McCain’s rationale for what qualifies her to be vice president is among other things her motherhood. We do not hear her name without mentioning she has 5 children and one with downs. She also is against sex education in school and abortion.
Why can’t we consider her judgement as a mother then when we consider her for the vp. I do feel sorry for her daughter who is going to have to go through this pregnancy in the spotlight but instead of blaming the media what about her parents? I cannot imagine subjecting my daughter to that. Also, even if Bristol herself is pro-life was adoption ever an option and even if it were it would be impossible to do that while in the spotlight. She clearly did not have many options, again based on the decision of her parents.
Again, this is relevant because it demonstrates someone’s judgement. I find it more than ironic that the family values party has a candidate who does not put her family first.
I also do not think it is sexist to ask these questions, if she were a man I would hold him as accountable as a father. For too long fathers have not been asked to sacrifice anything for the good of the family and they should!
no more high roads, kelly.
we should get mean and nasty and mean and nasty again.
besides, it isn’t clear that there isn’t any virtue in pursuing this story.
the Christian Right has been telling American females that under most any circumstances they should carry a fetus to term.
okay, let’s see how it goes.
Why do liberals always assume that the only “choice” is abortion? Whatever happened to the wonderful choice of adoption?
I’m all for equal rights for men and women and actually believe in stay at home dads, but don’t you see a family screaming out for attention and a mom that is too busy to see it?
Good for you, Hilzoy. Sarah Palin is fair game. Her kids are off limits.
Just One question; You’re wrong. Liberals do not assume that abortion is the only choice. Few liberals I know actually think abortion is a “good thing”. What we do think, however, is that the state has no right to force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to full term.
Just one question: Why do liberals always
assume that the only “choice” is abortion? Whatever happened to the wonderful choice of adoption?
Adoption is not the alternative choice to abortion. When a person discovers she is pregnant, her two choices are to abort the pregnancy or to continue the pregnancy to term and give birth.
Losing your child permanently (or at least until after the child’s 18th birthday) is not a “wonderful choice”, either. You would have to be fairly inhuman to think it was.
Please list the birthdays of Sarah Palin’s 5 children
Adoption is a wonderful choice and is the option for abortion. For you to think otherwise is inhuman. You should talk to people who were adopted, like my husband, whose unwed young mother gave him up for adoption to a good family because she could not support him. He is thankful everyday that she did not kill him in her womb.
Now, while it is a wonderful choice, no one is saying that it is an EASY choice. But I have several girlfriends who have opted for adoption, and have been grateful they did, in spite of the emotional difficulties involved.
I think your comments are admirable.
However, a mother made a decision to thrust her daughter into the national limelight for her own ambition. If Palin is the rising star that the GOP claims, she could have waited to step on the national stage a few years from now, for the sake of her daughter’s privacy.
This story is absolutely fair game because it shows the recklessness of the McCain campaign in making this decision. I feel sorry that this young teenager is part of the collateral damage.
I am a strong Obama supporter and I find Governor Palin’s views on issues such as abortion and abstinence only sex education repulsive and destructive to human freedom and knowledge. But let’s just all leave her daughter alone. She doesn’t deserve to be turned into some token in our political gamesmanship. There is enough wrong with Sarah Palin’s politics; why should we draw Bristol into this?
No, it’s different.
But nice job of dehumanizing your opposition. Way to continue the debate. Oh, wait, your opponents are not human. Thus, debate is a waste of time….
I DESPISE “collateral damage.”
Killing the italics:
Did it work?
But I have several girlfriends who have opted for adoption, and have been grateful they did, in spite of the emotional difficulties involved.
????!!!!
Is this a generational thing? I was a teenager more than 30 years ago, but when I was a teenager:
2. No one in my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances got pregnant because we all used birth control. We knew what it was, where to get it, and we by God used it.
2. The occasional – very occasional – girl who did get pregnant got an abortion (this was pre-Roe, so she went to NY, where abortions were already legal) or dropped out of school.
I didn’t even encounter a milieu where “several girlfriends” all got pregnant out of wedlock until the early 90s, when I lived near a high school that specialized in troubled teens (including teenage moms).
Has society changed that much since I was a teenager? Do sexually-active teens not routinely use birth control? Is it considered uncool or something?
Now, while it is a wonderful choice, no one is saying that it is an EASY choice.
Your original comment could easily have been construed that way – it suffered from brevity.
Speaking as an adoptee, and knowing many others, it strikes me that it’s every bit a lottery as to what kind of people your adoptive parents turn out to be as your birth parents.
Ive always enjoyed a good conspiracy theory- the one Im hearing now is that Bristol is not preggers at all. That this is just a smokescreen to get rid of the persistent rumors that Bristol was Trig’s mother (ie she can’t be Trig’s mom if she’s at 5 months- note that this is exactly how long she’d have to be pregnant to rule this out).
And the evidence in favor of the original conspiracy, while circumstantial, is not weak or easily dismissed (eg an AP pic of Sarah in tight clothing at 7 months but not showing, her bizarre trip from Texas to Anchorage and then a 45 minute drive *away* from the best neonatal unit in the state to have the baby delivered by her family doc).
If this theory is true, Bristol will have a ‘miscarriage’ soon and everything will go away.
Now, Im not saying that this is true. And I basically agree with hil that this- while fascinating in a car-wreck sort of war- ought not be grounds for political manuvering anyway. That is, no one should be bothering Bristol with any questions, trying to locate the father, etc.
Several others have already pointed this out:
The Republicans never scored points with Chelsea.
Besides, points are trying to be scored with Sarah Palin, not her daughter, since it’s her mother who has been using her family as a political tool. Live by the sword…
One other thought on the original conspiracy theory (ie that Bristol was Trig’s mother)- IMO it wouldn’t reflect very badly on Sarah P. Lying to protect a child from a (arguably) bad choice and taking the child as her own would be an understandable thing to do. My primary fascination comes from the conspiracy theory itself, not because I think the act would’ve been so wrong.
I admire your stance on this Hilzoy, but good luck keeping it from becoming a political football. I’ve no doubt some of the more unprincipled and classless left-wing partisans are already getting their barbed pitchforks ready on this one.
McCain has foreclosed any chance of my voting for him by picking Palin as his veep candidate, since I can’t stomach the thought of putting a lightweight Christian right identity politics candidate one very plausible heartbeat from the Presidency. But as you say, the Palins are human beings and deserve to be treated with some dignity.
I definitely come down on the side of leaving Bristol out of it. Morality aside, it doesn’t do any good. She’s 17, and at this point, she’s making her own decisions. (Though with her mother in the spotlight, I wonder exactly how much pressure is being exerted on her about this.)
I’m far more concerned about decisions Sarah Palin herself has made – and between the firings, the corruption scandals, her admitted lack of knowledge, and her own personal decisions, there are more than enough reasons already to worry about the kind of judgment she would use at a national level. All of that before even looking at her political positions.
I’d say that there’s more than enough to talk about without bringing up personal decisions or actions taken by other people. The fact that they live in her household doesn’t imply that she has direct control over them.
Well said.
JHA
Hilzoy,
I resurface briefly to suggest that if you don’t put up another thread on a topic, any topic, the stance you take in the post is undercut. I mean, if we took your words to heart, there would be no comments in this post. (or everyone could start talking about something else, but I think that would be rather disrespectful of you, so no one has done that)
Hilzoy and russell,
I almost always agree with you two, who, as a pair, show more perspective than most anyone I can recall.
And, indeed, attacking Palin’s daughter would not just be stupid, it would be mean. However, mentioning the pregnancy subject as to how it may or many not relate to policy Palin would craft seems perfectly acceptable, perhaps necessary.
If the party of family values constantly holds their lives up as so much more virtuous than the rest of us — the same part of values that has questioned Barack Obama’s religion and on and on — I think it’s only natural to examine what kind of lives they do lead.
Not much different from the rest of us, it turns out.
Turns out their kids have sex at age 17, too.
Shocking.
Others have said it better than I could.
Warren Terra: “More seriously, there are substantive aspects: Sarah Palin is praising her daughter’s decision in a choice she’d deny to others, and despite what Hilzoy says, and even though I realize anecdote is not the singular form of data, this is about as clear-cut an example against abstinence-only education as they come: intact family, good financial and educational circumstances, strong Christian family values – all defeated by simple human biology.”
middlegirl: “However, a mother made a decision to thrust her daughter into the national limelight for her own ambition. If Palin is the rising star that the GOP claims, she could have waited to step on the national stage a few years from now, for the sake of her daughter’s privacy.”
That was actually my reaction to seeing Palin speak for the first time Friday, how it was obvious she was a rising star and how the GOP seemed foolhardy for rushing her onto the national stage.
We’ll see.
Hilzoy’s Call for Decency:
Over at Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy has a post decrying the blogosphere’s rumor-mongering about the Palin family children that is worth quoting a…
lj raises an interesting point, as usual:
“Hilzoy,
I resurface briefly to suggest that if you don’t put up another thread on a topic, any topic, the stance you take in the post is undercut. I mean, if we took your words to heart, there would be no comments in this post. (or everyone could start talking about something else, but I think that would be rather disrespectful of you, so no one has done that).”
Just a suggestion: Where does the presidential campaign go from here?
In light of Gustav, the GOP seems in no hurry to get back to their convention business and it seems as if Obama and Biden have to follow their lead — or risk seeming insensitive.
Might we see a kinder, gentler resumption?
Nah.
I don’t have time to read all the comments here, but I read several at the beginning.
Trying to link Bristol’s pregnancy to Sarah’s govt. policy views is stupid.
You have no idea what Sarah taught at home.
And, questioning McCain’s judgment in taking Sarah? How does that follow? A daughter’s unplanned pregnancy disqualifies the mother?
You are very progressive here. /sarc
She’s 17, and at this point, she’s making her own decisions. (Though with her mother in the spotlight, I wonder exactly how much pressure is being exerted on her about this.)
I’ve been wondering that too. Without family support how feasible would it have been to get an abortion? If she had decided to abort would the family have supported it? Financed it? What would her choices have been if they had not?
The ends do not justify the means. Bad means will inevitably corrupt good ends.
I agree with Hilzoy’s post – it is nobody’s business what this girl does. But the statement above sticks in my craw because it’s just wrong. Saying that ends do not justify means is meaningless. It depends on *which* ends and *which* means. And I don’t know that less-than-good-means necessarily always corrupt good ends. It depends. That false contruction is literally disarming, particularly in the face of an amoral political opponent, for whom virtually any means are justified. This idea that one’s means must always be not only utterly pure, but without even the possibility of construal as other-than, lest the ends necessarily be corrupted, is unserious. War (eg WW2) is an obvious example of horrible means which must sometimes be used for a good, or relatively good, end. If the ends never justify the means, then there is no reason to have an Ethics at all.
Why was Palin chosen by McCain? Because of her conservative social beliefs? Not exactly. Rather because she, and the people who are thrilled and placated by her, want to legislate their social/religious beliefs onto everyone else. That is the point of a *politics* about *social beliefs*. What Palin and her daughter do are their business. What Palin does in the political arena is our business. It makes no difference if this young woman had sex education in school or not: her mother’s political position is that there should be no sex education, no STD education, and that all pregnancies, other than those which threaten the life – not just the health – of the mother, must, by law, be brought to term. That is medieval, as far as I’m concerned, but it’s her right to believe that for herself. I don’t see any moral problem, however, with discussing these political beliefs, since a discussion is continually thrust upon us, by social conservatives generally, and now by Palin’s family situation. This is the politics they have chosen, and the rest of the country – the rest of the world, to an embarrassing extent – are prevented from avoiding it whether we want to or not. It’s the right wing version of ‘the personal is political’.
I don’t want to see a picture of the daughter, I don’t care what her name is, and I’m really not interested in knowing anything about her, nor do I think it’s my right to know anything about her – she is not the issue. But this is a political context. As Ann Friedman points out:
Yglesias goes on to say that:
Exactly right. The Obama campaign is being both morally and politically correct to just stay away from this. But I don’t see why the rest of us have to do. Do we want this kind of social conservatism enforced on the whole country? That is not an impertinent or tasteless question. The fact that I have to ask it is, in fact, the problem.
put up another thread on a topic, any topic
Yes, please.
This thread is conspicuously below the standards of the at least semi-respectful and thoughful commentary that I’ve come to associate with ObWings. [hilzoy: note that one comment has been posted using a new handle which is in and of itself a blatant violation of the posting rules. A cleanup on aisle 5 may be in order].
Is this sort of thing a result of Wa Monthly cross posting, or is it just the topic de jour running downhill into the gutter?
Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if we are witnessing an orchestrated attempt to spew vile comments on left-leaning blogs for the purposes of discrediting them and tarring the Obama campaign by association.
Just one question: You should talk to people who were adopted, like my husband, whose unwed young mother gave him up for adoption to a good family because she could not support him.
And you should talk to women who lost their children to adoption, like a friend of mine who lost four of her daughters. For a woman to lose her child – to know she may never see the child she gave birth to again: I never met a woman to whom that had happened who didn’t remember and regret her loss for the rest of her life – even if her child got back in touch with her after the child’s 18th birthday, she had still lost all the years of her child growing up.
“We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby…
Bristol may not be fair game… but this statement by Sarah Palin, running on a platform to deny other 17-year-olds the freedom to make a decision any other way, certainly is.
I don’t know where you spent the 90’s, but here on Earth this wasn’t true. It is true that they never really sexualized Chelsea, which I guess is a good thing, but with Bill around I guess they didn’t need to look further to inspire their prurient comments. From their disgusting comments on her appearance as a twelve-year-old (imagine! an adolescent with braces! transiently awkward!) to their obsessing about essay assignments at her high school, the Republicans absolutely went after Chelsea. The R’s would have likely done more of it except that the Clintons, with the media’s help, managed an incredible job of giving their daughter as shielded a childhood as they possibly could under the circumstances. It’s about the only unambiguously unselfish and unadulteratedly praiseworthy thing I recall about the otherwise quite self-serving and morally grey Clinton administration; frankly I quite honor it.
Despite Barack’s classy call for people to let this go, Bristol Palin’s pregnancy will continue to be an issue, not only because people love a drama, but also because the right-wing evangelicals are touting the pregnancy as an example of the Palins’ genuine pro-life family values. There’s a lot of hypocrisy to that approach (no one praises inner-city teenage mothers’ values) and people will feel compelled to point that out. So as long as the rationale for Sarah Palin’s VP nomination is, among other things, that she’s a true pro-lifer based on her family’s biography, Bristol’s pregnancy will remain at the front of everyone’s mind. Indeed, at this point, with all of McCain’s emphasis on Sarah being a PTA hockey mom moose hunting beauty queen, aka talented outsider who will breathe some fresh air into our politics by dint of who she *is*, her personal attributes will necessarily be among the first things the media, and voters, will notice.
Suggestion for new topic: Why was there so little coverage on liberal or even left-wing blogs of the police treatment of demonstrators in Denver?
How different is the Twin Cities clampdown, which adds the feature of “preventive” raids on houses, offices, vehicles, and bikes before a single foot has been set to pavement? (Amy Goodman and two Democracy Now producers were just arrested a few hours ago, by the way.)
How many of you even knew about this moving Iraq Vets Against the War demo in Denver, covered quite well by the Denver Post? How about the mass arrest of 100 people on “Michelle night”, pinned into a block and pepper sprayed?
CaseyL – I do think there’s a generational trend toward becoming pregnant as a teenager and carrying the baby (and continuing to care for the baby). For whatever reason, there’s less of a stigma attached to having children out of wedlock, and lots of teenage girls become baby crazy. Just an observation…. I am in your generation – those days when people practiced birth control.
Warren Terra, of course certain Republicans went after Chelsea (mostly Limbaugh and others of his species), but the question is, did they do their side any good by it? My guess is no. I can’t imagine there being anyone who was otherwise on the fence who would’ve been more inclined to vote Republican because of those attacks.
While too much energy may be at the moment drained away from more important discussions, I nonetheless think that 95% of this thread is otherwise perfectly okay: There’s a difference between salivating and speculating over a teenager’s private life and having a (dare I say it) meta-discussion about the moral and strategic repercussions of doing so.
The upshot of this whole thing for me is: My regard for Andrew Sullivan got knocked down a notch. (I’m sure he’ll be heartbroken.) And, yes, I know he wrote cautiously about the subject, but his harping on it gave it more credibility than it deserved.
I’ll confess that I was enjoying it in a not-very-admirable, juicy tabloid way…until I went to Daily Kos and read the piece that seems to have started all of it. The tone and logic of it reminded me of the sort of thing I despise “the other side” for. It was Drudge-y, presenting a fairly intriguing circumstantial case in the smarmiest, most dishonest fashion. (I actually think the circumstantial case is pretty strong, despite the number of dubious data points sullying it.)
I’ll also mention that Sullivan’s backing off from it wasn’t very well done. One photo of SP looking pregnant — just about the easiest thing in the world to fake — and he dropped it. I suspect he just wanted to wash his hands of it.
But — because I’m not a regular visitor to Daily Kos — I assumed that article was “official”…in the sense of a post here by hilzoy or publius, rather than “unofficial”… in the sense that my posts are. And it gained a certain amount of credibility on that account. If I understand correctly, “diarists” are just posters; and some person who hadn’t posted in three years suddenly writes this slimeball piece, which looks like it’s coming from the site itself.
I’m thinking that Markos should either police his site a little better (assuming that it’s policed at all) or things should be labelled a little more clearly.
I agree with Hilzoy. For those of us, like myself, who are nevertheless frustrated by what the GOP would do if the situation were reveresed, we should remember that we believe we are better than that, and we can still have the pleasure of sitting back and watching a GOP presidential campaign implode for once.
“The daughter is very pregnant. And the way that our campaigns work, there is nothing but the brightest spotlight on the family in the running. And the bottom line is, knowing your daughter is 5-6 months pregnant, is now the best time to make the run for VP?”
So translated what your saying is “what kind of mother are you running for VP while your daughter is having a baby” Ridiculous.
The Palins could have come public with their daughters pregnacy when they deemed appropriate but unfortunately some of the sickos on the left took care of that with the actions on KOS this weekend. And it was speculation laced with venom including not only Palin’s faking her pregnancy but insinuations of incest between her son and daughter.
No one should have to deal with this. Period. end of sentence. You want to argue issues fine. But our writer is correct. Take the high road boys and girls and leave the kids alone.
If the ends never justify the means, then there is no reason to have an Ethics at all.
jonnybutter,
I was curious whether somebody out there was going to catch that one.
Believe it or not, this is something that I’ve actually put some thought into. So here’s my answer:
The original statement “The ends don’t justify the means” is the abbreviated, fits-on-bumper-sticker version of a longer ethical position which normally takes too long to explain and fails to get the point across. So sue me for using rhetorical hyperbole. Since you asked, here’s the longer version, as I see it.
Of course the ends justify the means. What else would? The idea of chosing some course of action without regard to an intended result is irrational. Where things get tricky is when we start moving towards the end of the scale where more destructive and morally repugnant means are justified by greater and greater ends.
The problem is that human beings are not very good at judging either the means or the ends, so as to perform some sort of cost-benefit calculation to keep them in due proportion to each other. Cognitive bias will almost always lead us to underestimate the costliness of our chosen means, while overestimating the importance of the ends being sought.
This introduces a systematic bias into our cognitive processes for rationalizing our actions, and (this is the important part) the psychological pressures which create this bias are magnified as we progress towards the extremes. We are much better at rationalizing horrific actions than we are minor transgressions, because more powerful mechanisms of denial and cognitive bias kick in.
This is how you get people who can feel guilty about cutting somebody off in rush hour commute traffic, but not about helping to start a war which kills hundreds of thousands of people.
The conclusion I draw from this is that we have to assign error bars to our own estimates when we weigh means and ends and attempt to relate them to each other in an ethical manner, and the size of these errors need to increase as we approach more extreme conditions.
If you conceive the justification of means based on ends as a graph on 2 axes, then the curve which justifies a given means based on a particular end being sought should rise in a parabolic (roughtly speaking, I’m not being mathematically precise here) fashion. At some point the curve should go assymptotic as we approach means which we do not conceive as ever being justifiable under any circumstances.
This is a long way of saying that extraordinary means must be justified with extra-extra-ordinary ends, and increasingly so as we go down the dark path.
All this is completely leaving aside the issue of how realistic we are about the ends in question actually being achievable as a result of the means we propose to use in pursuit of them, which is subject to the exact same cognitive bias problem.
That is how I square the notion of ethical limits on our conduct with the WW2 problem.
@Warren:
“even though I realize anecdote is not the singular form of data, this is about as clear-cut an example against abstinence-only education as they come:”
Well, if you actually do realize that, could you point us at a large-scale study that shows us what the actual difference in teen pregnancy rates is between abstinence-only educated and comprehensively educated teens? And even better, the STD incidence rates for each?
I have absolutely no idea what the results of such a study will show — intuitively, I’d guess “no difference outside the margin of error” — but I say that the correct educational stance is whatever is proven most effective by a statistically significant study, not a single example. Can you say the same?
“No one in my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances got pregnant because we all used birth control. We knew what it was, where to get it, and we by God used it.”
Do you honestly believe that kids today don’t know where and how to procure birth control, or more amusingly, that they don’t know what is is? What a laugh.
There is a lot here. I tried going through it to see if this had been mentioned, but I may have missed it.
A valid question, in my mind, this pregnancy raises is about how Palin governs with respect to other mothers. Bristol is lucky to have a financially secure family who can help her financially and emotionally. before and after the child is born.
From the LA Times via K Drum:
French faulted Palin for not helping the Legislature pass a bill to raise the benefits threshhold for children and pregnant women from 175% of the poverty level to 200%. (Most states set them at 200% to 250%.) “She said she wanted to help us raise it,” French said, “but couldn’t be bothered to do anything in the closing days of the Legislature, when she could have helped it through.”
Bristol probably won’t have to worry about this, but other mothers in her situation would. This is a valid issue that should be brought up with Gov. Palin. What would happen to someone identical to Bristol except lacking a family to assist her. Is that mother someone the state should abadon during (abortion) and after (benefits) her pregnancy.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2008/08/palins_governing_style.html
The best study I could quickly find is here (PDF). Skimming the graphs in the executive summary, it appears that there is no difference in sexual behavior or knowledge between abstinence-only and comprehensively-educated teenagers – principally because neither group actually follows the precepts of abstinence-only education, and both engage in sexual activity and use birth control to similar degrees.
But note one thing here: the teens still have knowledge of and access to birth control despite their abstinence-only education. The same people who don’t want them to be taught about birth control are part of a wider movement that would deny them these resources.
P.S. I recall from news stories that some STDs were found to have increased among the abstinence-only-educated, but I couldn’t find any such studies quickly, so I have no idea whether that was significant.
I almost never read D Koz and almost never read Sullivan either, so I didn’t realize what Hilzoy was reacting to.
This particular 17 year old girl should absolutely not be at issue. Yes, leave her alone. But, for god’s sake, she does exsist, and we all [are forced to] know about her whether we want to or not. And, I repeat, Palin is the GOP VP nominee because of her personal social conservatism, and her political desire to foist it onto everyone. This is not a game. Leave this young woman alone? Yes. But also leave other young women alone. Leave everyone alone! If you are ambitious and run for high office on the basis of your personal religious beliefs, and you want everyone to nevertheless leave *your* family alone, then that’s fine so long as you leave my family alone, too, and the families of others. How Palin conducts her family life ought to be her business alone. It’s she who has made it everyone’s business – by going to lunch on her religious right views, not by accepting McCain’s nomination – and I don’t feel sorry for her at all.
Imagine that Palin was a conservative, but didn’t base her politics on abortion, birth control, religion, etc. If that were the case, only the slimiest of slugs would care that her 17 year old unmarried daughter was pregnant. But Palin pretends to be a moral/political exemplar – she *chose* that. She wants the official policy of this country to be: just say no; forced childbirth; ignorance. This is comeupance, AFAIC.
Nell- All I can say about the police state tactics is that they scare me. That’s really the only way to put it. When people are doing something entirely constitutional (not to mention legal), something that is part of the essence of a free society, something that I’ve personally done in the past…
The ‘Good Guys’ aren’t supposed to do stuff like this. Then again, the ‘Good Guys’ aren’t supposed to torture people or invade countries for no reason. Or do a lot of other things that have happened in the past 8yrs.
Did this get posted at that Washington Monthly site, too? I hope so.
The Republicans never scored points with Chelsea.
Of course they did. Every Democratic politician considering a run for the White House is going to have to ask himself, “Do I want to put my family through that? Is there some other way I can serve my country without putting them through that”?
And Republican politicians don’t have to make that choice because certain people have decided that Democrats should play nicey nice, and that the best way to respond to a frontal assault is to lay prostate on the ground, begging for comity.
It is sickening. There is but one way to deal with bullies.
Learn to fight, and then you won’t have to.
unfortunately some of the sickos on the left took care of that with the actions on KOS this weekend.
The rumor about the youngest not being hers was already out in Alaska. Sure, the guy at Kos did something sleazy. But do you have any evidence that ‘the left’ started the rumor in AK? Promoted it? Even realized it existed before Palin got the nod?
Sarah Palin is praising her daughter’s decision in a choice she’d deny to others
I’ve seen a lot of stuff similar to this. For some reason, you folks are equating “keep the baby” with “not have an abortion.” There’s another option: “give the baby up for adoption.”
Let me get this straight, according to the allegations set forth in a lot of the posts here, Palin’s public policy positions don’t square with the behavior of her nearly adult child. Presuming that is true:
Whoa! Alert the media, folks! New Flash! Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Teen-agers do things that their parents don’t want them to do!
But, not so fast, there Skippy. Lets look at the facts of some of the allegations here, Palin is anti-abortion, but is reported to be pro-contraception.
http://dwb.adn.com/news/politics/elections/governor06/story/8049298p-7942233c.html
So, even though Palin is pro-contraception, her daughter’s boyfriend was too damned lazy to go to Wal-Mart, or a gas station bathroom, and buy a rubber. Or was too stupid to improvise with a Twinkie wrapper or a hunk of caribou intestine and a rubber band.
All that being said, she Palin’s daughter is going to have the baby.
So, it appears that Palin’s public policy positions regarding 1) contraception and 2) abortion are entirely consistent with her family situation. What was the problem again?
Bye now.
Mrs. Palin & family,
I am praying for you. You CAN get through this. I pray that God will carry you with a peace that surpasses all understanding. Please don’t be discouraged. Hold your heads high. We stand firmly supporting you and your family through REAL life situations. Jeremiah 29:11 ‘For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.’
sincerely,
Aimee, Nick & Gracyn Young
What’s with the sanctimonious nonsense? This is hilarious. This corrupt, power-mad, lying, evil, insane person who thinks she’s going to be president someday has just slipped on a banana peel and fallen on her ass and we’re not supposed to laugh? Look, I don’t know the private Sarah Palin or her family and I don’t care one way or another about them any more than I care about any other bunch of total strangers. But I fucking hate the public Sarah Palin and anything bad that happens to the public person is fine by me.
Are you all real? This lady is sooo unqualified to be Vice President! I’m seriously thinking myself of running for President in 4 years if this is all the requirements you need!!!
She’s been mayor of a small town and a governor for ONE year? She’s traveled outside the U.S. ONCE and she’s met John McCain once before he asked her to run with him?
OMG!!!
Now this stuff with her daughter! Yes, anyone’s teenage daughter can get pregnant…that’s not what I have an issue with….what I have an issue with is her mom that is abandoning her when she needs her the most! And, what about her special needs infant? She’ll be campaigning for 12 or more hours per day and exactly how much time will she spend with her baby?
I cannot believe ANYONE would even consider voting for this ticket!
Sarah Palin apparently said her daughter chose to keep the child. Chose? Apparently her daughter has options that Ms Palin would deny other women. Otherwise, she was coerced to continue the pregnancy or Ms Palin believes there are two sets of laws: those for her and her family and those for others. She also seems to request privacy for her family that she would deny other families. Now, I’m not advocating we put the daughter under a microscope, but we certainly can ask tough questions of her disengenuous mother.
Palin is an inspiration to myself and my own daughters. Watching all the cowardly sniping going on, I am beginning to be convinced that my former companions on the political path are not worth following any longer. It is not just KOS. Look at yourselves. You have lost your own sense of human decency.
A shame for Obama to lose for the slithering likes of yourselves, but it may happen. Sad creatures.
Sarah Palin’s fitness as a mother isn’t fair game??? I beg to differ. It’s only a matter of time before the world finds out the identity of “Levi” and the rumors are that he and Bristol had been dating since she was 14 and that he is several years her senior. It’s understandable that the campaign doesn’t want to reveal his identity, but why have they also refused to disclose his age? If they were both close in age, then most people would understand that Bristol’s pregnancy is just one of those things that happens. But what if the rumors are true and Sarah Palin allowed her daughter to date an older boy when the girl was only 14? Doesn’t that tell us something about what kind of President she might be? This incident coupled with Palin’s reckless decision to board an airplane while going into labor speak volumes about the kind of judgment she is apt to use as President Palin.
re: means and endsThe problem is that human beings are not very good at judging either the means or the ends, so as to perform some sort of cost-benefit calculation to keep them in due proportion to each other. Cognitive bias will almost always lead us to underestimate the costliness of our chosen means, while overestimating the importance of the ends being sought.
Of course a cost/benifit analysis is crucial. But there is nothing really ‘automatic’ about it. You obviously have thought about this, but I don’t see how your bumper sticker version and your longer version really relate to each other. You said that bad means must corrupt the ends they seek. That may be true, but we don’t always have a choice but to have somewhat corrupted ends. Sometimes – usually – we have to choose between bad and worse ends. I do think there are some things which are always wrong – like torture and the death penalty – but things like that tend to be not very good means for anything anyway – torture and capital punishment are not effective means to any end. But my point is that there’s no getting around making a judgement. There’s no formula. We must try to factor in congnitive bias, etc.
I don’t like seeing the privacy of this poor teenager violated, but I also think it’s ethical to make her situation the point of departure for a feminist – humanist, really – argument against Palin and what she represents, politically. It’s a greater-enough good, AFAIC, that socially backward legislation which would affect millions of people be thwarted, vs the 10-minutes-of-fame loss of privacy to this young woman. This calculation is contingent on the usefulness of the means – if, like torture, the aforementioned argument is useless, or the publicity is only for its own sake, or just to embarass these people personally, then there’s no question. Leave them alone. But this story is what they want for YOUR children and your neighbor’s children.
Republicans never scored points with Chelsea? What about Limbaugh? What about McCain himself?
SOME of you democrats should really be ashamed of yourselves. You act like sharks. Whenever you sniff out some blood your in for the kill. What about your own humanity? Are you too caught up in stirring up trouble to actually have a solid campaign. You guys are trying to win a campaign based on pointing your finger at the republican party. What in the world can you really do?
So, even though Palin is pro-contraception, her daughter’s boyfriend was too damned lazy to go to Wal-Mart, or a gas station bathroom, and buy a rubber.
That’s so inane that all I can say is it takes two to make a baby. If the boyfriend doesn’t have a condom, either she says no or she buys some herself. She’s not just a passive object that has to accept whatever decision the boyfriend makes.
Just One Question:
The virtues of adoption, and they are obvious and many, do not negate the impermissiblity of using the police power of the state to force women to carry pregnancies to term against their will. That’s what the abortion debate is about; it’s not about trying to convince people that abortion is a simple procedure without repercussions.
We also should acknowledge that all infants do not have an equal chance of being adopted.
Watching all the cowardly sniping going on, I am beginning to be convinced that my former companions on the political path are not worth following any longer.
Examples?
OT- Serious question. Is ObWi a site that you can earn McCain Points from? Can any blog earn you points?
I gotta’ say, the whole concept of earning points for putting out talking points and not having to defend them is pretty lame. It very easily lends itself to a hit-and-run that just stirs people up and doesn’t convince anyone that McCain’s position is correct. Being called a shark and fed some talking points probably makes me less likely to vote for a candidate.
Sarah Palin gave birth to a baby with Down’s Syndrome at the age of 44.
Is anyone else appalled at this?
The risk of giving birth to a baby with Down’s Syndrome is extremely high in women over 40 (and even higher when the father is also over 40).
http://www.webmd.com/infertility-and-reproduction/news/20030701/dad-age-down-syndrome
Sarah Palin “opposes the use of birth control pills and condoms even among married couples”.
I am disgusted by this irresponsible behaviour. To give birth at age 44 to a baby with Down’s because you refuse to use birth control inexcusable. Ignoring the dangers that you expose yourself and your baby to by refusing to use birth control after 40 is negligent and careless. To believe that a woman like this has the opportunity to become Vice President of the United States of America in 2008 makes me ill.
Does anyone else share this opinion?
Sarah Palin gave birth to a baby with Down’s Syndrome at the age of 44.
Is anyone else appalled at this?
The risk of giving birth to a baby with Down’s Syndrome is extremely high in women over 40 (and even higher when the father is also over 40).
http://www.webmd.com/infertility-and-reproduction/news/20030701/dad-age-down-syndrome
Sarah Palin “opposes the use of birth control pills and condoms even among married couples”.
I am disgusted by this irresponsible behaviour. To give birth at age 44 to a baby with Down’s because you refuse to use birth control inexcusable. Ignoring the dangers that you expose yourself and your baby to by refusing to use birth control after 40 is negligent and careless. To believe that a woman like this has the opportunity to become Vice President of the United States of America in 2008 makes me ill.
Does anyone else share this opinion?
Her boyfriend is 18.
If you want to examine Palin as mother, or Palin as pregnant woman and medical decisions as indicator of ability to lead than shouldn’t that be a test for all female candidates for elected office? Maybe we should examine their choice of mate as as indicator of judgment as well. (You really think that will attract women voters?)
Of course, being a mayor, being a governor of a state, that isn’t enough, is it? Actually having to make decisions (she can’t actually vote ‘present’) isn’t enough. I am quite sure that both her daughter and the boyfriend were aware of contraceptive alternatives, unless you think that contraception is somehow equivalent to rocket science?
Nope, all this for a pregnant 17 year old girl and her mother, for whom you wouldn’t have voted anyway.
Considering the ever increasing teen pregnancy rate, how do you think that full on sex ed 100% contraception is working? Really great, right?
Palin’s daughter hasn’t been punished by a baby. She’s being punished by a group of people who are pissed off that her mother is the VP nomination. And didn’t get there on the coat tails of her husband.
As a 47 year old single man, I know lots of women who have had abortions, sometimes more than one. None of them, not one, are glad they did. It bothers most of them to this day.
I hope that this back fires. If Obama loses, and I hope that he does, remember your vicious postings, appalling backward reasoning, and remember how little simple human decency you possesed.
frogcatcher, the risk of Downs is greatly increased over agr 40, but it’s still not so high as to justify your comment. See Wikipedia on this:
That’s about a hundred-fold increase in risk – but it’s still about 5%.
Remember, if you don’t give the secret ObWi callsign, you’ll be marked as a newbie. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but your comment won’t be taken as seriously as it ought to be. Please look thru the archives to find the secret callsign as it is generally given once every 3 of 4 months, usually in a comment, usually within the first 5 comments after a post…
“So, even though Palin is pro-contraception, her daughter’s boyfriend was too damned lazy to go to Wal-Mart, or a gas station bathroom, and buy a rubber.”
The article cited said that Palin is pro-contraception (which I guess means not anti=contraception) and belongs to ‘Feminists for Life’:
Nice that she thinks it’s OK for the rest of us to use birth control if we want. Not all of the people in her political camp feel the same way. Of course the main point is: no abortion, even in the case of rape, incest, birth defects or to preserve the health or life of the mother.
closed circuit to all those who are so appalled: do you know the difference between private and public action?
Jack, I can see that you’re angry, and I recognize some of your talking points (by the way, misrepresenting Obama’s “present” votes is so February), but I’m not sure who you’re reacting to. Nothing resembling the sort of comments you seem to be criticizng have been made by the vast majority of the pseudonymous bloggers in this thread, and that sort of thing was explicitly disavowed by the blog’s proprietor.
Everybody (ok, a few blog commenters, such as AK) keeps talking about how Palin’s praise of her daughter’s decision to ‘keep the baby’ really is in implicit contrast to adoption, not abortion, and hence the whole ‘choices she would deny other people’s daughters’ claim is all wrong. But this doesn’t necessarily follow from the actual quote, which I’ve only seen as:
“ We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby . . .” [emphasis added].
“Have,” not “keep”. Taken nitpickingly literally, it suggests that one alternative here would have been for her not to have the baby – presumably meaning abortion. Whether the Palins are so obsessively parsing what they say . . . well, it would be quite understandable to me, if they weren’t – but this is politics, and I don’t understand that world at all.
Anyway, I think Ugh’s 3:23 point is extremely important. While it surely would have come out in the news at some point, it was entirely unnecessary as a defense against bizarre internet rumors about Trig’s maternity – all she had to do, if the campaign felt it was necessary, was release her own medical records. And while I share whoever-it-was’ revulsion that this might have been politically necessary, I don’t think it would have been. – Really, I think most people would have thought that it was a kinda creepy and rather ludicrous-sounding bit of gossip that was almost certainly false (and if not – what?). and reflected rather badly on its carriers. (Ok, that’s what I thought, but am I so unrepresentative in this case?)
And yes, of course, personal attacks on Bristol Palin would be disgusting – I just saw one of the pictures of her, in an OSU sweatshirt, and it makes me, well, kinda sad. I hope things work out for her. But I haven’t seen any such attacks, although a few of the comments strike me as fairly distasteful in other ways. It seems to me that the attempted Rovian attack-their-strength style thing that goes ‘Ha ha, your family’s not so perfect now, you preachy little . . .’ almost certainly will backfire among anyone not already half-sold on this general attitude (at best) but more importantly to me, it’s just kinda gross. But pointing out that Palin’s policy preferences would have real-world consequences for countless real-world families – well, surely there’s a wrong way to do it, but the point itself is legit – indeed, beyond legit.
If this sort of breathless pandemonium is what we can expect from ObWings from now on (I assume this a byproduct of the Washington Monthly crossposting), then so long guys, I’m outta here. This thread is just like every other political blog I’ve familiar with, where the low signal to noise ratio makes it hardly worth the effort.
Gary, bedtime, Turb, russell, Nell, jes, and everybody else whom I’ve forgotten to mention on short notice, thanks for the memories.
I’m going into occasional lurker mode now, I’ll come back from time to time to see if things have settled down.
Adios amigos!
frogcatcher- Have to disagree with you. You seem to say (and correct me if I’m wrong) that women after 40~ shouldn’t have children period.
Now if I were a doctor and a female patient was thinking about having a baby after 40, I’d certainly advise her of the risks and urge testing, and whatever else would be appropriate. But for me to say that she has no business having children at that age is sanctimonious. As long as she knows the risks and is willing to take them, it isn’t our business.
Also, do you have a link for the anti-birth control position? I’m inclined to believe you on that, but I’d like proof before I start telling friends/family.
Jack- Considering the ever increasing teen pregnancy rate, how do you think that full on sex ed 100% contraception is working? Really great, right? What are you talking about? Where in the US are teenagers routinely taught about contraception in sex-ed? The Bush administration basically only funds abstinance-only sex-ed and those programs are the majority in the US.
Also, despite what folks like Limbaugh say, liberals don’t like abortion. It isn’t a walk in the park and it has consequences. The issue of choice is about whether the government should force women to carry babies that they don’t want or should women be allowed control over their own bodies.
To be pro-choice means that one doesn’t want abortions, one wants women to have the option that is best suited to their life and situation. Safe, legal, and rare is the driving philosophy behind choice, it has nothing to do with promoting abortions.
“Some of them — Sarah Palin, for instance — place themselves under a media spotlight of their own free will. Others — her daughter, for instance — wind up there through no fault of their own. Imagine yourself in her position: there you are, seventeen years old, pregnant, unmarried.”
Ya, imagine this…and then imagine making the decision to accept the potential VP position knowing this about your daughter and the way the media would have a field way with the news. I think it is extremely SELFISH of Palin. Sarah is supposed to be all about family so it IS out business that she apparently couldnt talk to her daughter about protection or premartial sex.
When Palin was introducing herself and her family….apparently we needed to know that her son was such a great American and went off to war..so why cant we know that her daughter is stupid enough to not use protection or can’t just NOT HAVE SEX as her mother’s political party suggest. It’s not hard to NOT get pregnant.
Also, the fact that Obama’s mother was also a teenager when she had him is not relavant for this time. We are living in WAY different times and back in that day it was common for people to get married at a super young age.
TLT: I don’t think it’s the Monthly so much as the fact that this post was linked by Instapundit.
LeftTurn- Don’t you dare leave! You’re one of my favorite commenters to read. I’ve never seen you post without adding something to the discussion or giving me something to think about. And if I were the only person to feel this way, I would be very surprised. I don’t think you realize how valuable a member of the ObWi community you are.
I don’t blame you for losing patience with some of the comments on this thread. Just take a deep breath and come back tomorrow. Or else! ^.^
What’d y’all think of Obama’s acceptance speech on Thursday? I thought it kicked ass, and was definitely the most news-worthy event of the past week.
What, we ran out of Trol-B-Gon again? Dang it, what kind of blog are you people running up there?
hilzoy, since you are apparently reading the comments, as was suggested quite a long time ago by someeone, another thread – even just an open thread, but their suggestion of the police-state tactics in the Twin Cities would be extremely appropriate – would be great. It would let some of us escape from this thread, and provide an outlet for those of us who are at least trying to stop obsessing over the weird blending of soap opera and national politics we seem to be getting at the moment.
TiO offers a shelter of last resort.
When you run on a family values platform consisting of abstinence only sex education then trot out your knocked-up 17 year-old daughter it IS the fault of both of them. When you get in MY face and those of my children and tell me how to raise them, how you run your house is –definitely- fair game. Putting “family values” ahead of public health and a child’s future makes it fair game. Bristol could have easily said, “Mom, I don’t want to stand on the national stage with you” and Sarah should have declined the VP offer altogether. She can’t handle her business, what business does she have running the U.S. at the highest level? True, “no one is perfect” but you expect your elected officials to have their personal lives in order (shotgun wedding???). “Do as I say not as I do” won’t work in this scenario. Hypocrisy, a form of lying, is also a sin – one of the big 10.
This stinks – I believe they deliberately vetted the worst (female) candidate so he can kick her to the curb while feigning innocence. That’s the REAL reason he wanted to postpone the RNC – they could care less about Hurricane Gustav; they just wanted to drop this bombshell, let it ferment for a week in the media, then allow Palin to “graciously” withdraw herself from consideration. Then he’d pick his real choice, Joe Lieberman, hoping all those embittered Clinton voters will scream “at least he tried to pick a woman!” If they buy that sack of crap and he’s elected because of it, this country deserves that a-hole. He makes slick Obama look like an angel. They hoped to blame the fallout on the “left wing media conspiracy/Obama camp”, but Obama’s not taking the bait and they had to accelerate the process, letting the chips fall where they lay. The next few days will be VERY interesting.
Right, Lizzie. The Obama campaign, the candidate himself, the blogger who wrote this post — his primary supporter on this blog, and more than half the commenters on the post all take a strong hands-off stance on attacking Gov. Palin’s personal, family situation.
But you want us to believe you were an Obama supporter who’s just so inspired by Gov. Palin and so shocked by commenters who disagree with the main post that you’ve sadly turned against him. We weren’t born yesterday.
The personal rumors and innuendo started with right-wing Republicans in Alaska, spread through conservative blogs, and were given prominence by Andrew Sullivan, a conservative gay pundit who’s reversed course in many ways over the last ten years.
Don’t even think about trying to pin this line of attack on Democrats in general.
byrningman- I would love to talk about Obama’s speech. Single best speech he’s ever given, IMHO.
It struck a great balance between emphasizing the good a Dem president would do and criticizing Bush and his 3rd term guy for the harm that they have done/will do.
One of the things that disappointed me in 2004 was the wimpiness of Democrats, who seemed to say everything was great in America but Kerry could tweak things and make it even better! This time, though, we put the responsibility on the Republican doorstep where it belongs, but did so without seeming like ‘bad guys’ or petty jerks, unlike the Repub 2004 convention.
My only complaint? The music after the speech kinda sucked, but it was made up for by watching Sasha play with the confetti and balloons. That girl is adorable!
I’m grateful, though, that 38,000,000 people saw the speech, and because McCain wanted to steal Obama’s thunder, we didn’t have to refute the Republican spin of the speech.
It does remain kind of amazing that 24 hours after the first African-American major-party nominee gives a speech that’s billed ahead of time as the most important speech in his career, in front of 85,000 people and watched by 40 million at home, you’d have been hard-pressed to find any acknowledgement that it had happened in the news. I was as enthralled by the Palin choice as anyone, but it wasn’t the only thing I was interested in. I remain convinced that she will hurt McCain’s chances in the long run, but she surely did win him the news cycle.
P.S. I was one of those 40 million, of course. I thought the speech was awesome. And I teared up a couple of days later when I saw a picture of Muhammed Ali sitting in the stands.
Hilzoy,
It took me a half-day (and a baseball game) to digest this:
I don’t think that’s right. There’s a qualitative difference in asking your daughter to sacrifice a normal adolescence and putting your daughter in a position where, as a consequence of actions she’s already taken, she’s going to be exposed to national ridicule and intense scrutiny into what must be a private and painful set of circumstances. It must be hard enough to be going through what she is, without compounding it by having it night and day on CNN in the middle of the Election ’08 coverage. All of that is not at all like having your high school dates chaperoned by the Secret Service.
That is, while in each case, the fault of the parent might be the same (selfishness), I think we’d weigh these pretty differently because what the kid is being exposed to, in each case, is quite different. Bill Clinton might still be a more selfish person than Sarah Palin, but there’s no way that what he forced of Chelsea compares to making your daughter go through this.
“Brett: Ok, I missed where she asserted “that it was an infallible way to stop “teenage girls from getting pregnant.
”
“Actually, most supporters of “abstinence-only education do claim that “it’s the “only 100 percent effective “method”. Whether Palin has ever echoed “those words, I don’t know.
“Posted by: Jesurgislac | September 01, “2008 at 03:04 PM”
Hey there JESURGISLAC:
Actually, most supporters of “abstinence-only education” do not claim that the any type of “education” is an infallible way to stop pregnancies for any age groups –
They claim that “abstinence” (from heterosexual intercourse} is an infallible way to stop getting pregnant.
Now do you see the reason you keep having all those kids?
Have a nice evening.
lj: working on it…
Hil: TLT: I don’t think it’s the Monthly so much as the fact that this post was linked by Instapundit.
Ah. So that’s why Reynolds doesn’t have comments.
Yeesh.
Dammit, Typepad cut off the “astard”. matttb was me, not some Insta-n00b.
Speaking of…
“Hey there JESURGISLAC:
Actually, most supporters of “abstinence-only education” do not claim that the any type of “education” is an infallible way to stop pregnancies for any age groups –
They claim that “abstinence” (from heterosexual intercourse} is an infallible way to stop getting pregnant.
Now do you see the reason you keep having all those kids?
Have a nice evening.”
EPIC TROLL FAIL
“ask yourself how you felt when Republicans scored points using Chelsea Clinton, who didn’t ask to be dragged into the spotlight either.”
I didn’t feel anything because that never happened. Republicans never made Chelsea an issue in any way shape or form. As opposed to the Newsweek reporter who tried to obtain Barbara Bush’s admission file to “prove” that she had gotten into Yale only because of her family connections.
Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy may relevant as an example of the ineffectiveness of abstinence only sex education? Do you have any evidence that she received abstinence only sex ed. in her school in Alaska? Abstinence only is ineffective as compared to the comprehensive sex ed (in one example of many) that a representative of the Los Angeles Unified School district provided in the 1999 said, “so many babies are born to teens every year that the Los Angeles Unified School District has implemented an on-campus day-care program for infants at nine of its high schools and arranged for low-cost child care for older toddlers at many other schools.” [http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:F5nibehhAQkJ:www.thefreelibrary.com/TEENS%27%2BRATE%2BOF%2BPREGNANCY%2BHIGHER%2BIN%2BL.A.-a083623869+teen+pregnancy+rate+at+Los+Angeles+Unified+School+district&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us]. Sex ed works so well in the inner city.
EANDOM PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET OUT OF MY UTERUS
This nonsense about Palin’s personal life is going on all over the liberal blogs, and for the first time I can remember the right-wing trolls are talking sense.
The hell, man. Where AM I? I thought this was ObWi but I must’ve taken that regular’s pseudonym.
“Does anyone else share this opinion? ”
Not me. Among other things, “ignoring the dangers that you expose . . . .your baby to by refusing to use birth control after 40 is nonsensical; if you (consistently and 100% successfully) use birth control after 40, there isn’t going to be a baby for you to have so exposed. This isn’t like ‘drinking heavily while pregnant is a really irresponsible idea’ – here the risk factors are inseparable to the baby’s ultimate existence. It sounds as if you’re opposing a) women having kids after the age of 40, and sorta by extension (and perhaps not quite intentionally), anyone having a baby with downs syndrome.
Jack – your first paragraph was pretty sensible. Unfortunately, it really went downhill from there. First off – while I don’t think anyone here knows much about whatever the specific knowledge, beliefs, decisions, and general situation of those two young people, the damage done by abstinence-only education is far wider and more subtle than “well, surely they knew about “contraception alternatives”. The anti-birth control crusade tries to indoctrinate kids with scary lies about how condoms kill! – and are at best almost completely useless, like all other forms of non rightwing-religious-sect-sanctioned birth control – which are elsewhere presented as abortion; there’s also a great deal of emotional manipulation – basically, thinly-disguised slut-shaming, among other techniques – which are the exact opposite of the kind of responsible approach to sexual behavior which good comprehensive sex ed tries to inculcate (and which, while challenging, appears to be doing just fine in a number of European countries).
“Considering the ever increasing teen pregnancy rate . . .”
In our reality, “The U.S. teen pregnancy rate for teens aged 15-19 decreased 38 percent between 1990 and
2004.” [pdf].
“ . . .how do you think that full on sex ed 100% contraception is working?”
Unsure what this means – my impression is that most folks who don’t support “Just Say No” (to sex) as a pragmatic and foolproof approach seem to support comprehensive sex ed, which “covers abstinence as a positive choice, but also teaches about contraception and avoidance of STIs when sexually active” [quoted from wikipedia ] -r egardless, that’s the actual alternative.
“Palin’s daughter hasn’t been punished by a baby”
Ah, the quotemine that keeps on giving. Of course, this refers to some forced-birthers’ constant refrain about how women who dare to be improperly sexual must face the “consequences” of their actions, rather than avoid them by abortion or even birth control. In other words, they – as we see it – appear to view babies as a punishment for misbehaving, one that bad women are attempting to circumvent so they can selfishly go around having Teh Sex (with exciting abortion parties afterwards!) Granted, this sounds insane and somewhat literally in-credible, but I haven’t come across anything that otherwise explains it in a way I can understand. (Whether that’s perhaps my fault, I dunno).
Anyway, my view, which I don’t think is too far from the average pro-choice one (or what was being said in the quotemine): babies are never a punishment; being forced by the authorities to become pregnant or give birth to one against your will because you had sex- whether because they prevented you from receiving accurate and useful info about birth control, restricted your practical access to birth control, or indeed prevented you – de facto or de jure – from accessing abortion services . . . . that’s punishment.
“As a 47 year old single man, I know lots of women who have had abortions, sometimes more than one. None of them, not one, are glad they did. It bothers most of them to this day.”
The relevant questions, of course, are 1) if they would have rather have carried the pregnancy to term, 2), do they wish they had been forced by the state to have given birth (or risk dangerous, unsafe, illegal abortions, if they couldn’t count on family money and connections), and do they wish this choice upon other women now, and 3) what are the best ways to ensure that it’s rare that women would be faced with this choice. I’ll give you a hint for the answer to #3 – it ain’t ‘vote for the current GOP.’
This should have said:
Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy may relevant as an example of the ineffectiveness of abstinence only sex education? Do you have any evidence that she received abstinence only sex ed. in her school in Alaska? Abstinence only is ineffective as compared to the comprehensive sex ed (in one example of many) provided by the Los Angeles Unified School District in the 1990’s? It was so bad that a representative of LA Unified said in 1999, “so many babies are born to teens every year that the Los Angeles Unified School District has implemented an on-campus day-care program for infants at nine of its high schools and arranged for low-cost child care for older toddlers at many other schools.” [http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:F5nibehhAQkJ:www.thefreelibrary.com/TEENS%27%2BRATE%2BOF%2BPREGNANCY%2BHIGHER%2BIN%2BL.A.-a083623869+teen+pregnancy+rate+at+Los+Angeles+Unified+School+district&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us]. Sex ed works so well in the inner city.
Actually, make that “random.” Eandom people can crawl right up there.
Ara: There’s a qualitative difference in asking your daughter to sacrifice a normal adolescence and putting your daughter in a position where, as a consequence of actions she’s already taken, she’s going to be exposed to national ridicule and intense scrutiny into what must be a private and painful set of circumstances.
The rest of your comment is spot-on as well, but this stuck out. What Clinton did (running for pres with a school-age child) may well be selfish, but the key is how they handled it. Chelsea was given every opportunity to have as normal a life as possible, insofar as circumstances permitted. Regardless of your opinion of the Clintons, they did a terrific job raising their daughter in a difficult situation.
Palin, on the other hand, doesn’t seem above using her children for political gain. She stresses how her oldest signed up for the military on Sep. 11 ’07. When she talks about the infant, there’s an undercurrent of, “Look at how great a person I am! I’m willing to raise a disabled child!” And with her oldest daughter, its hard to shake the sense that the campaign is using this as a way to deflect criticism*. After all, her family has issues just like any other.
While Palin and her family have my sympathy for the situations that aren’t their own choice (DS baby, pregnant daughter), I absolutely can’t accept using any of them for political gain. Politicians using their families as political props or tools is just wrong, no matter which side does it. I’m not voting for Michelle or Sasha Obama, and I’m not voting against Cindy McCain. I’m voting for the candidate who I believe best reflects my views and who I think is the best choice for the country. If the reason you won’t vote for Obama is because you don’t like his wife, then frankly, you have no business voting at all.
Democracy requires an informed citizenry and for anyone to vote on something other than issues is to betray this very concept. I understand that one’s family can reflect on their suitability for office, but it should only be considered when either the family situation is relevent (domestic violence), or when the candidates are near identical and there’s no other way to decide short of flipping a coin.
* I would argue one of the reasons they made an announcement like they did was to squelch the rumors about who the youngest belonged to. If that was indeed a concern, why not just release her medical records like other candidates have? This struck me as using the daughter to clear Palin, something highly selfish.
Y’know if one of ’em had to get eaten, I wish it’d been the correction instead of my original comment. Trust me, though, it wasn’t as interesting as that makes it sound.
Guttmacher confirms that Alaska has plenty of sex ed info.
Contraception:
Among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, Alaska ranked
* 1st in service availability;
* 14th in laws and policies;
* 1st in public funding; and
* 2nd overall.
“[R]ANDOM PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET OUT OF MY UTERUS”
N00bs out of my tubes!
(ok, not my tubes, being n/a in that sense, but y’know what I mean . . .
Dan S.: You get a gold star! Way to take apart someone’s argument while making my attempt look amateurish. I tip my hat to your rhetorical skill. ^.^
yea, I suppose we could be talking about the substantive proposals Obama brought up, like the tax cuts 95% of some group.
but I can’t help but to think the ice is breaking under the Christian Right here.
I’ll bet most people are feeling terrible for Bristol, thinking that she’s a victim of the Christian Right having pushed their ideological envelope too far.
It’s one thing when it’s a theoretical discussion, or even if it your choice, but, to deny another person’s freedom based on one’s own ideology?
that’s the real wickedness.
And poor Bristol is putting a face on it for us.
If I were a teenage pregnant girl, I imagine the chief horror of the situation would be the knowledge that everyone in the United States is talking about this episode in my life. The fact that some of them are talking about it to say “we really shouldn’t be talking about this” doesn’t particularly lighten the burden.
Who is responsible for the fact that the entire US media is talking about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy? Sarah Palin is responsible. She decided to make her daughter’s pregnancy national news at the moment she accepted the nomination for Vice President.
Finally, I believe this entire episode has been of real informative value to the American people, and myself in particular, in learning what kind of person John McCain has nominated for the VP slot. He has nominated one of those extreme right-wing Christians who embraces deliberately ignorant moralistic platitudes as a way of managing complex issues like teen sexuality, and then, in the high likelihood that their moralistic platitudes fail, dubs it a “personal tragedy” which they will address with help from Jesus Christ, and asks for the sympathy of society. More simply put, he’s nominated one of those evangelical moms with the weird makeup and the pregnant teenage daughter who she forces to marry her high-school boyfriend. Okay, we know who this is. This is one of those weird people who has nothing to do with the kind of America I want to live in.
Respectfully I think most of you are missing the larger point in all these family matters.
McCain and his judgment and his campaign tactics is the main point.
McCain either did not vet this woman and acted completely recklessly in his first big executive decision OR McCain knew about all this and didn’t care about the kid being thrown to the media wolves at all.
Neither of those leads us to believe he should be leader of the free world.
McCain and his campaign chose to trot this family out as a paradigm of family values, chose to draw Palin as a virtue of reform when it turns out not so much, chose to use this family to energize his followers because he couldn’t.
If McCain had chosen to simply introduce Palin as a young, learning, very promising young new face for the party as he would like to see it grow, none of this would have been an issue. If he had introduced her as having a daughter in a tight position but supported by her family none of this would have been an issue. If he had introduced her honestly as having come from small town (Alaska is a small town in it’s entirety) politics and all the foibles that go with that, none of this would have been an issue.
Instead McCain tries to schmooze her through as a virtuous gun toting Christian ethicist.
McCain insulted our intelligence and by lying and misrepresenting this woman and her family to us, he threw them under the bus long before any resultant gossip about them will.
Shame on you John McCain.
In short, don’t run away from the story, just reframe it.
If only there were some way to expose Palin’s extreme views which are broadly unpopular with the
American public without using her daughter, like, say, something televised, perhaps in a “debate” format, one in which subjects like a woman’s right to choose will inevitably be discussed.
Oh well. There’s certainly nothing like that on the horizon, so we’d better get cracking on the whole lowering ouselves thing.
Spot-on, Hilzoy. But isn’t it good to know that 16 years after the Murphy Brown episode the GOP has gotten itself into a position from which it will never be able to plausibly attack unwed mothers again? Change comes in strange ways.
G Davis: In short, don’t run away from the story, just reframe it.
Bingo. The key to this election is defining McCain. And by defining, I don’t mean that we should lie or distort the truth because we don’t need to. All we have to do is point out how he makes decisions, how he’s reckless, etc. John McCain has given us the rope, we just need to put it around his neck.
gil mann: The thing is, with all this hubbub about Palin’s personal life, I’m worried the moderator will be too afraid to bring this up. I can imagine the pressure the thugs from McCain’s campaign are putting on people to keep questions favorable for their guy/girl.
Where is Judd Apatow in all this? Shouldn’t he issue some kind of public apology?
Shorter me: Is it really so ridiculous to demand that people not take actions that would make a public spectacle of their pregnant teenage daughters?
Sarah Palin could have decided that she didn’t did need to go for this particular job. Parents, moms and dads, do it all the time – turn down the promotion that requires a move midway through high school, cut back on overtime so they can make it to the soccer game, and so on. In her case, she’s young, and she would have had plenty of options to try out on the national stage in 2012 or 2016.
Knowing what was bound to happen to this poor kid and her boyfriend (who seems to have had no vote at all in this), John McCain and Sarah Palin decided that sacrificing these kids to the paparazzi was an acceptable price to pay to advance their own ambitions right now.
This is not about the kids who made a mistake. This is about the candidates who made a very cynical decision.
Ordinary people turn down promotions all the time for the sake of their kids, when the downside for the kids is far less than here, and those same ordinary soccer moms and dads are going to be wondering what kind of person Sarah Palin is to have made such a different decision.
I remain convinced that she will hurt McCain’s chances in the long run, but she surely did win him the news cycle…
Sort of- she’s dominating the news cycle way more than Biden did, but not in a good way. Apparently she’s lawyered up for the Troopergate investigation…
I mean, McCain could’ve crapped himself on stage to ‘win’ the media cycle after Obama’s speech, but I don’t think that the increased media coverage would be helpful, even in the short run.
Shorter me: Is it really so ridiculous to demand that people not take actions that would make a public spectacle of their pregnant teenage daughters?
I dunno, the general tenor of that seems sexist to me. Really, really trying not to throw stones here, but I don’t see anyone making that argument if a male candidate’s teenage daughter were pregnant. Well, obviously the VRWC would slime Obama if his neighbor’s daughter got pregnant, but I mean real people, not robots.
otoh, if Sarah Palin is running in no small part as a ‘hockey mom’, then her record as a hockey mom is open to scrutiny. I mean, Track? Trig Van Palin (rhymes with “Van Halen”)? A girl named Bristol (a name which inevitably makes me think of facial hair)? Oh,the humanity.
Carleton: I’m with you all the way on the kid’s names. What the hell is wrong with parents nowadays? Either you give your kid a name that’s horribly misspelled or you give them a name that makes no sense whatsoever!
Reading the births section of the local paper is literally painful, doubly so when its someone I went to school with and thought was reasonably intelligent enough to give their kid a decent name.
Sarah Palin gave birth to a baby with Down’s Syndrome at the age of 44.
Is anyone else appalled at this?
I can’t think of any of the regular posters (including myself) on this site who would be appalled at this. We don’t agree on abortion rights: some support more restrictions on abortion than others. But for those of us who are pro-choice, pro-choice means that women get to choose whether or not they continue with any particular pregnancy, whether they’re 16 or 46. If they want to give birth to a disabled child they can, if they don’t want to they don’t have to.
maybe its just that I am from NZ but the situation with her daughter seems like a vote winner (not that she would intentionally subject her children to that sort of thing). And quite a significant one. Partly because it causes this sort of post and says nothing bad at all about her personally and partly provides cover for other issues like trouper gate.
What Hilzoy, Russell and Farber said re the relevancy of a daughter’s pregnancy.
It appears to me that the real dog piling is by liberal women (just my anecdotal observation). I guess seeing a strong, family-oriented woman having a modicum of success is simply too much to bear if that woman is a conservative. Sisterhood goes out the door. Reminds me of how liberals turn on black conservatives.
Troopergate is a non-starter. The timeline doesn’t work. This is too. What it IS doing is lowering expectations of Palin which may eventually turn out to be a huge boon in her favor. What voters will eventually see won’t match what they’ve been hearing from bloggers everywhere and the MSM come debate time. She won’t even have to do as good as Biden to win.
I have to give credit to Obama on his statemente re the pregnancy. He is right there with Hilzoy.
However, he separately (diff segment) went on to tout his own “executive experience” vis a vis his campaign boasting of more workers than the workers in “Wassili” (what, he hasn’t heard of Iditarod!!! Who cares about foreing policy experience-Obama needs some Alaskan experience) and a bigger budget. I guess the far larger state budget and far larger group of state employees is meaningless.
I take all this breathless non-stop badgering as a good sign. Nobody on the left was ready for this and all anyone can do is lash out. Sarah Palin is the news cycle. And nothing appears to bug the talking heads more than a real person. (“What, you haven’t written your own audacious autobiography yet or reenacted military landings for future use in campaigns spots!! And you gather your own food?!!”) There’s not one smidgen of real discussion of issues other than the ones that aren’t going to change anyone’s mind.
“The gloves must come off in this battle.”
This always seems to be an announcement made before a justification of why something morally wrong must be done.
It’s the same claim made by those who want to justify acting like Nazis.
I dissent.
Decline and Fall: But isn’t it good to know that 16 years after the Murphy Brown episode the GOP has gotten itself into a position from which it will never be able to plausibly attack unwed mothers again? Change comes in strange ways.
*laughs*
Attacking veterans: Okay to do it to Kerry, 2004: a crying shame to do it to McCain, in 2008. Acknowledgement from the GOP that there’s been any change in their position: none.
Attacking men who wed woman much richer than them: Okay to do it to Kerry, in 2004: a crying shame to do it to MCain in 2008. Acknowledgement from the GOP that there’s been any change in their position: none.
There’s been no change. It’s the same rule you can depend on: IOKIYAR.
“I resurface briefly to suggest that if you don’t put up another thread on a topic, any topic, the stance you take in the post is undercut.”
I resurface to suggest this is complete crap.
For the same reason: people are not responsible for the acts of other people. Hilzoy is not responsible for the fact that some people disagree with her.
Troopergate is a non-starter. The timeline doesn’t work.
What does this mean? She clearly fired Monegan. Her office clearly had inappropriate contact with Monegan. Monegan claims that Sarah herself contacted him (and that he has the emails to prove it), but that hasn’t been substantiated. The only questions up for grabs now are whether her staffer acted on his own initiative to attack her ex-brother-in-law or not, are how much inappropriate pressure was applied.
What part of the timeline are you taking about?
I take all this breathless non-stop badgering as a good sign. Nobody on the left was ready for this and all anyone can do is lash out. Sarah Palin is the news cycle.
I dont know if you’ve noticed, but lefties are throwing house parties about this. We are excited about this complete trainwreck of a nomination. And no, it’s not a good thing to dominate the news cycle with scandals, stories about lack of vetting, etc.
Sarah Palin is the joke of the hour, and it’s on McCain.
There’s not one smidgen of real discussion of issues other than the ones that aren’t going to change anyone’s mind.
Im sure that abuse of power and lying in speeches is pretty old hat to the GOP now, but the rest of America still manages to work up some interest in these sorts of things. Call us old-fashioned.
Maybe you haven’t noticed that it’s Labor Day weekend, Nell?
But before I read this.
Jes: It’s the same rule you can depend on: IOKIYAR.
Out of curiosity, is there a similar rule in Britain? That is, for example, do the Conservatives over there get held to a standard that Labour flounts at will?
bc: I think you’re only right about Dems being surprised about this. I don’t think anyone expected a pick this stupid, but Carleton is right: we’re throwing parties and dancing in the streets over the Palin pick. And after maybe 30 minutes of research (probably more than McCain did), we’ve found out enough of her crazy positions to hang her out to dry.
Sorry, Nell, you asked about Denver. Well, speaking only for myself, I’ve been busy with my own problems. Sorry.
hilzoy – Your argument has a fundamental flaw and contradiction: yes, Sarah Palin chose to “place [herself] under a media spotlight of [her] own free will. Others — her daughter, for instance — wind up there through no fault of their own.”
However, Sarah Palin CHOSE HER OWN POLITICAL AMBITIONS OVER PROTECTING THE PRIVACY OF HER CHILD – JUST WHEN HER DAUGHTER NEEDS HER MOST!!!
“Adios amigos!”
Come back, Shane! Come back!
Seriously, dude, don’t make over-quick judgments on the basis of a single thread, or couple of days. Obviously this post got linked in places that brought in a flood of less than thoughtful posters, but it ain’t a major trend yet.
If it tragically becomes one, I’ll go elsewhere, with great sadness, too, but let’s not leap to conclusions.
very sad, thats what happens when you run with a filthy women, they should all be made slaves anyway just like god created them to be.they ruin everything. the mccain camp is done
bob,
You’ve just violated the posting rules, good taste, grammar, and common sense. Please go away before you break anything else.
I wrote:
the stance you take in the post is undercut.””
and Gary replied
I resurface to suggest this is complete crap.
Given the discussion in the thread, it is a relief to bang heads with Gary. I realize that hilzoy can do little in the face of an Insty-lanche and I am certainly not blaming her. But as trolls pop up and pop off, and regulars then take the time to respond to them, Hilzoy’s clear call for leaving the topic alone results in more talk about the topic that Hilzoy says, quite reasonably, we should leave alone. This is what undercutting a stance means. Note that I fiendishly didn’t say who was undercutting it, so you may have forgotten any number of times when I have noted my respect for just about everything that Hilzoy does on this blog, but suffice it to say that the idea that I think Hilzoy is to blame is a mistaken assumption.
BTW, my thoughts are with you as you try and negotiate your dental problems and speaking of your medical problems, a friend I spoke to who suffers from gout has found that the home remedy of black cherry juice to be quite effective. best wishes.
This sounds like a soap opera. The American people sound like soap opera watchers. I am tired of having my intelligence insulted by this continual trolling for the lowest common denominator. To suggest, with a straight face, that this woman is the most qualified woman the GOP has to offer for vice-president is absurd on its face. What this proves is the GOP doesn’t take governing seriously. Who cares about compentence when you don’t believe in government and don’t care about it functioning. This is Harriet Miers writ very large and the most cynical appeal to the women’s vote I’ve ever seen. What I don’t understand is where are the principled conservatives to decry this embarassment to their beliefs?
Really, really trying not to throw stones here, but I don’t see anyone making that argument if a male candidate’s teenage daughter were pregnant.
Huh? I do. Absolutely, no doubt about it. “You shouldn’t run because it will drag your daughter into the spotlight” would play equally for either gender. John Edwards took flak for running when his wife had cancer, and then more flak for having run when he’d had a recent affair.
But ultimately Diane Snyder is right: the point is that John McCain has turned the campaign into a joke, a soap opera, by picking this woman. It’s just a joke. The guy is not a serious man, and he’d be a disastrous president. We’d be dealing with this kind of crap every other week.
Carleton Wu:
I really have no idea why you would think that I wouldn’t hold a father just as accountable to not make a public spectacle of his daughter as I would hold a mother.
Now, you might be saying that in these same circumstances, a father doing the same *wouldn’t make as much a spectacle of the daughter* as it does when it’s the mom, particularly an abstinence-only mom. And I’d be inclined to agree with you. But that’s independent of my point. My point is: once you know that something is going to cause a spectacle for your daughter, don’t do it! Don’t do it, regardless of whether the reasons why it would make a spectacle have to do with the sexist assumptions of our society.
It goes back to what I said about making decisions based on the world as it is, not on the world as it ought to be.
Diane: Grover Norquist has said that he wants to shrink government enough so that it could be drowned in the bathtub. Seeing as a lot of Republicans share certain of his views, I am inclined to promote a conspiracy theory!
Bush & Co. are running the country so poorly to make people think government is ineffective at best, and downright harmful at worst. By choosing partisan hacks to run various departments, and ignoring qualifications altogether, the government becomes less ‘useful.’ McCain tries to continue in the fine tradition of Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers and ‘Heckuva Job Brownie!’ Eventually, people lose so much faith that Cheney can take the Constitution out back and shoot it, ushering in a new age of ‘conservative’ paradise!
The sad thing is, the more I look at leading Republicans, to more inclined I am to take this conspiracy seriously. Still not wearing a tin-foil hat, though! ^.^
You wrote:
You directly stated that if Hilzoy didn’t act, the stance she took was “undercut.” Her inaction is to blame.
That’s what you wrote. And then elided.
Since it’s perfectly obvious that Hilzoy will post another post, whether five minutes from now, or in two hours, or twelve, or 48, you’re directly stating that unless she acts on your timing, until then, it’s her fault that her stance is being undercut.
I disagree.
You’re welcome, of course, to withdraw or modify what you wrote.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Huh? I do. Absolutely, no doubt about it.
I guess I do think that there’s doubt about it. 🙂
“You shouldn’t run because it will drag your daughter into the spotlight” would play equally for either gender. John Edwards took flak for running when his wife had cancer, and then more flak for having run when he’d had a recent affair.
Those aren’t on point, I think. I was saying that gender stereotypes put the onus of children’s behavior primarily on the wife- particularly the sexuality of the daughters. I agree that there may be other areas where men are judged more harshly (although none leap to mind offhand- Im pretty sure that a woman having an affair would have a harder time than a man).
Ara,
I really have no idea why you would think that I wouldn’t hold a father just as accountable to not make a public spectacle of his daughter as I would hold a mother.
Apologies, I didnt intend to imply that you personally would do this, just that (as you agree, I think) society would do this.
It goes back to what I said about making decisions based on the world as it is, not on the world as it ought to be.
I guess I see this as more than something to notice about the world- breaking barriers is usually uncomfortable for the breaker and their families, and often punished. Im not trying to paint Palin as Rosa Parks, but we should do more than merely observe that the double standard exists. We should decry it. We should encourage others to notice it. Hopefully, in the long run, things will change.
The more I think and read about this, the more I think that Hilzoy’s stance here is simply wrong. It’s a shame that this has happened to Bristol Palin. It’s truly a shame. But look at the media coverage today. CNN, the Washington Post, the NY Times, everybody. The horse is out of the barn. It was out of the barn 24 hours ago. It was out of the barn the moment Sarah Palin decided to accept the nomination. It’s one thing to ask that the media refrain from seeking stories about a politician’s kids. But that bargain has always entailed a certain quid pro quo: the kids had to stay within certain limits of reason. In this instance the campaign was asking the media not to generally “lay off the kids”, but to put a lid on a story that already existed and that only emerged because the media had started hunting a different story. The McCain/Palin campaign utterly botched this; there was no way the media could have been restrained. And now that request is completely beside the point.
It’s out. It’s going to be topic number one for days, assuming nothing more sensationally insane comes out Palin’s closet (which may not be a safe bet). The question is how to discuss it. And I’m sorry, but the issue of abstinence education and safe sex is the glaring issue here. Sarah Palin apparently taught her kids not to use prophylactics. She also believes in making anti-prophylactic education government policy. She has now seen in the clearest possible way what the results of that policy are. How can she still support it? Doesn’t she wish Levi had used a condom? Did she want her daughter to become pregnant at 17? Does she want American teenage girls to become pregnant more often, or less often? Is she the kind of person who learns from her mistakes, or the kind of person who insists on rigidly following ideological preconceptions even in the face of proof of failure? This is a public issue. The GOP is claiming Palin is a more sympathetic mom because of the way she’s handling this. I disagree. I don’t think she’s sympathetic, I think this shows poor parenting skills; as a parent, I don’t think she’s a model for anybody. This is a prototypical dysfunction of evangelical Christian families. Can pregnant teen daughters happen in any family? Sure. But guess what? They happen a lot less frequently in families that discuss responsible sex with their kids. That is a serious public issue, and reflexively saying we don’t care to discuss it in this case is really irresponsible.
Those aren’t on point, I think. I was saying that gender stereotypes put the onus of children’s behavior primarily on the wife- particularly the sexuality of the daughters. – Carleton
Carleton, I just think that in this case media and political-discourse dynamics completely overwhelm the influence of gender roles. It’s easy to say any analogy isn’t “on point” because no male vice/presidential candidate has had a pregnant teenage daughter in the modern political era, and nothing else is really perfectly analogous. But the thought experiment many have suggested of what would happen if this were Obama’s teenage daughter is very helpful in this regard. He would be crucified. Certainly the discourse would play out a bit differently because he’s a man, but it wouldn’t be less public or less savage — if anything it could be more vicious, because mothers get more sympathy in dealing with their kids’ troubles than fathers do.
I disagree.
Well, we will just have agree to disagree.
In response to you labeling my comment as ‘complete crap’, I clearly restated that I didn’t blame Hilzoy, so if you are unable to understand or process what I wrote, I don’t know what other restatement would be sufficient for you and at this point, I don’t really care, so that’s all I have to say.
Certainly the discourse would play out a bit differently because he’s a man
And, of course, because he’s black. We were getting the “Obama’s Baby Mama” business from FOX when the Obamas hadn’t done anything the Huxtables didn’t do (other than go to law school, etc). And, of course, there’s the GOP slimeball factor, where the 2000 version of McCain was attacked for adopting a third world baby.
Let’s say Romney had been the Veep, and turned up with a 17-year-old pregnant daughter. I do think that the press would go apecrap to some extent, that’s what they do. Im not sure that it would’ve happened on this scale, or- more to the point- that they would be the sort of personal failure attributed to him that is attributed to Palin. Also, I get the sense that bc she’s running as a self-described hockey mom, that those hockey mom credentials are under examination now.
But I do agree, there’s no way of knowing, so all we’re really doing is trading hunches.
lj,
It’s Chinatown, man.
Jes: It’s the same rule you can depend on: IOKIYAR.
Out of curiosity, is there a similar rule in Britain? That is, for example, do the Conservatives over there get held to a standard that Labour flounts at will?
I’m not Jes, but I am in the UK. My opinion is that I don’t think there is a similar rule in the UK.
There may have been cases in which Conservative sex scandals were treated more seriously because the individuals involved had previously advocated “family values” and then looked hypocritical, but that’s to do with the standard they set for themselves, not one set externally. Both Conservatives and Labour have had scandals to do with finances, and were held to similar standards, I think. And at different times both parties have accused the BBC of being biased against them.
Carleton/Brooksfoe,
The most useful analogy I can think of is if the teenager child of a local politician had been casually using soft drugs (not a drug addict, nothing more than teen stupidity), the family and some of the locals had found out and the teenager said they were going to stop doing it. Most people would think ‘that could be my child’ and forget about it in a week or two. And if the politician ran for high office a few years later and anyone dug up an old scandal about their family, it’d be rightly seen as tacky.
But if the politician (male or female) then *immediately* chooses, right after this family difficulty, to apply for a post where their background is going to be closely scrutinised, that is just stupid politics and recklessly thoughtless about the likely effect on their son/daughter. The politician would get hammered by the press and they would have no reason to be surprised.
Hard work to scan the thread with so many passersby. First: Don’t go TLT, I like reading your comments both when I agree and when I disagree with you.
Jes: I think how and where you give birth is between a woman and her doctor/midwife. One can assume that someone who gives birth to her fifth child has a better idea about HER body’s signals than someone who never gave birth – or even than someone who’s birthing experiences are wildly different.
I don’t understand why proper progressives would want to support the notion that women are the ones responsible for the kids, that women should be the main caregivers, that women who are fertile (OMG, they can have babiez) or have children still living at home should stay away from demanding careers.
Joe Biden is praised for serving as a senator after the accident that killed his wife and daughter, and praised for travelling 4 hours per day to be a single dad at the same time. I would be horrified if people said that that accident was used as political propaganda, though it is mentioned to show his character. I would be really suprised if people would convict him for still becoming a senator, for leaving his sons in the care of others 12 hours a day – yet no one seems to protest when that argument is used against Sarah Palin.
We are all aware that Joe Bidens son is deployed to Iraq, but Sarah Palin should not mention that her son goes too?
If I could vote in the States I would never ever vote vor McCain/Palin. I will full heartedly rally against her social conservative positions. They are bad – and there are plenty of other bad policies she’d like to implement and appropriate critique on her nomination (incl. bad vetting proces, her connections with Stevens, her earlier Alaska independent ambitions, etc.).
But I’m a woman too and hold female issues dear. Having a working mother as a vice-presidential candidate is kind of nice, even if you disagree with most of her stances on issues. I always assumed that the democrats were protecting womens rights, were in favour of emanicipation and against suppression of females. This last year I learned that I was too optimistic in that area.
Commenting on how Palin can’t combine children and work is almost always sexist. Painting her as a bad mother and thus a bad vice-president is almost always sexist. Since previous experience tought me that my English is not adequate to properly explain when and why things are sexist, I gladly refer to the Sarah Palin Sexism Watch on Shakeasspeares sister (there is a Michelle Obama sexism watch too. And a HRC sexism watch. And an Obama racism watch).
Using the pregnancy of her teenage daugher in a political argument is bad. Not just for the reasons Hilzoy allready outlined and quite a few eloquent commenters explained, but also because there are so many unfounded arguments being used. As is noted earlier in the thread; Alaska seems to do fine in the availability of contraception. Alaska also gives teenage girls the option to get an abortion without parental consent so Bristol had a choice (and Alaska scores reasonable in availability of abortion services).
Marbel: I think how and where you give birth is between a woman and her doctor/midwife.
In this instance, it could also have been between a woman, her doctor/midwife, and Alaska Airlines flight attendants.
One can assume that someone who gives birth to her fifth child has a better idea about HER body’s signals than someone who never gave birth – or even than someone who’s birthing experiences are wildly different.
True: and as it turns out, she was right – she did have 24 hours of labour after her waters broke to get to the hospital of her choice in Alaska – an 8-hour flight and an hour’s drive away.
The consequences of being wrong would have been considerable, though. Especially, given this was a Downs syndrome baby…
I would be horrified if people said that that accident was used as political propaganda, though it is mentioned to show his character. I would be really suprised if people would convict him for still becoming a senator, for leaving his sons in the care of others 12 hours a day – yet no one seems to protest when that argument is used against Sarah Palin.
Well, there are some additional points that need to be taken into account. Perhaps you know about all these, so apologies, but it makes the comparison more fuzzy, so I think it is worthwhile to consider them
Biden was apparently adamant that he was not going to take office after his wife and daughter were killed in the auto accident and went to the governor of Delaware and asked that he find a replacement. At the insistent urging of Mike Mansfield, he took office, saying that it was for only 6 months, if I recall. The injuries his sons had necessitated hospitalization, so it’s not apparent to me that Biden could have provided the necessary medical care, and earning a living (and getting insurance coverage) would be compelling reasons to taking his seat in the Senate. He was also one of the youngest Senators in history, and it was only because he turned 30 between the election and taking office. Keeping in mind that this was 35 years ago, and the opportunities that Biden had if had not taken the seat may have been less than they might be now, Biden’s decision to be sworn in is different than Palin’s decision to abandon the governorship and accept the nomination, and I don’t think it is sexist to note that. Also, this link describes his upset campaign, and I would not be surprised if he was in debt (certainly not like the debt accrued by a modern Senatorial campaign, but I imagine it was nothing to sneeze at in 1972)
We also have Biden’s description of how Mike Mansfield, then Dem majority leader, urged him to take the seat despite his reluctance.
Also, in his first run for the presidency, he said he didn’t talk about his first wife or daughter and I don’t think he talked about it in this latest run. Maybe all of the political junkies knew this, so I might be off in thinking this, but I don’t believe it was general knowledge.
As well the stuff above (and a few other very funny stories), he also noted in his interview with Letterman on that his sister and husband moved into his house to take care of his two sons and moved out when he remarried 5 years.
I say this not to dismiss the problematic aspects of the narrative being constructed around Palin, but I think saying ‘hey, no one ever asked that about Joe Biden’ does a disservice to Biden and ultimately, to understanding the issues, because it suggests that there is some stock response to all this. Apologies if this is stuff you already knew.
I don’t think he talked about it in this latest run
by which, I don’t remember it being mentioned in the debates, obviously he wrote about it and his biography and the talk show tour, but in this interview with Jon Stewart, it never comes up.
“Sarah Palin gave birth to a baby with Down’s Syndrome at the age of 44. Is anyone else appalled at this?”
FROGCATCHER,
I wasn’t so much appalled that she chose to have a DS child as much as appalled that people think it’s somehow heroic. Women her age know the risks.
“they are about to use you and your unborn child to score points on one another”
They?
You mean Democrats and Liberals.
Because we (Republicans and Conservatives) left Gore and Kerry, etc’s kids alone. Democrats and Liberals on the other hand can’t keep their traps shut about the children of Republicans.
Voice of Moderation my *ss.
Hilzoy,
You said,
–“To my mind, this extends to using her daughter as evidence that abstinence-only education doesn’t work: presumably, no one thinks that it works 100% of the time, and that’s the only claim to which this one counterexample could possibly be relevant. “–
Apparently, you haven’t paid much attention to the rhetoric of the nosey demagogue Rush Limbaugh over the past 20+ years.
The religious fanatics who control the GOP refuse to allow for any understanding of the nuances and complexities of sexual relationships and birth control.
For them, it has always been Abstinence is Abstinence; and it WORKS ALL THE TIME, BECAUSE WE SAY SO.
I am all in favor of privacy for a candidate’s children, but the right to privacy does not entitle a politician to a right to hypocrisy — especially when the morality police like Bill Bennett have been shoving this stuff down our collective throats for the past 25+ years.
Because we (Republicans and Conservatives) left Gore and Kerry, etc’s kids alone.
“Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?
Because her father is Janet Reno.”
— John McCain
This is one issue we agree on, Hil.
Because we (Republicans and Conservatives) left Gore and Kerry, etc’s kids alone.
But not Bill and Hillary Clinton’s kid.
(I’m surprised, actually: I didn’t know John Kerry had children. They aren’t mentioned on his wikipedia entry.)
Not to be a total jerk, but actually some people DO think abstinence only eduction works 100% of the time. Or at least they’re willing to create elaborate government funded websites that proclaim that the “abstinence strategy” is 100% effective.
We do all remember that, right? The abstinence website that the Bush administration created about 3 years ago, where they reasoned that the “condom-use strategy” was highly ineffective because sometimes people who said they were going to use it would later not actually use condoms? But which evaluated abstinence in some sort of weird vacuum where every single teen who promised to stay abstinent did, thereby creating a 100% abstinence success rate?
bob: bye.
Good Morning MATTTBASTARD,
I am a stranger in a strange land –
a waif to your ways –
what means “EPIC TROLL FAIL”?
(it doesn’t sound good)
I guess my response, if someone asked me what I think about this situation, would be: I think parents should discuss responsible sexuality with their children, which means discussing using condoms to avoid sexually transmitted diseases or using other forms of contraception if you’re in a long-term committed relationship but don’t want to get pregnant. I think pretending that your kid is different from the other 60% of American teenagers who have sex by the time they leave high school is quite similar to the head-in-the-sand, best-case-scenario fantasy planning we’ve seen from the last administration in its approach to Iraq, New Orleans, and most other areas of public policy. Praying with your kids is great, but just praying that your kid won’t have sex is not a responsible parenting strategy for addressing teen sexuality. The fact is that most teenagers have sex, and I expect a good parent to have a “plan in place” (to quote Sarah Palin) for how to address that when it happens.
http://mhollick.typepad.com/homodox_a_blog/2008/09/taking-the-high-road.html
The point getting lost here is that it was the McCain campaign that injected Palin’s daughter into the discussion.
Conservative media want to spin this that the Democrats are the ones making an issue of this: another distortion. The whole issue was brought up by the Republicans because they knew they wouldn’t be able to hide her pregnancy in October.
That being said, I agree that children shouldn’t be the subject of political point-scoring. And I agree that some left-leaning posters see this kind of thing as red meat. But no one associated with the Obama camp is feeding this story; keep in mind that’s it’s Republicans, once again, who are using the children as political pawns.
As long as Palin’s kids are off limits, Democrats’ kids will be targets. Remember what happened to 12-year-old Graeme Frost’s family when he had a bit part in a Democratic commercial for children’s health insurance? The entire family’s financial and medical records were dragged into public in an attempt to maximally humiliate and discredit them, down to the type of granite they used for their countertops during a kitchen remodel.
Smears work. McCain’s nonexistent mulatto love child probably cost him the nomination in 2000. (and you wonder why he’s smearing now? He ain’t that senile!) 10% of the population thinks Obama is a stealth Muslim/Manchurian candidate. Republican will continue smearing Democrats and their families, ruthlessly and without even consideration for facts, until and unless Democrats smear back as viciously and effectively. Then, and only then will Republicans stop. The first indication of a truce offer is on now, with the same people who smeared Kerry’s and McCain 2000’s families now on TV whining about how unfair it is to – smear families. The relentless and, yes, brutal, attacks on Palin’s families have led to the first glimmer of hope for the Graeme Frosts and Bridget McCains of this world.
And if you think babygate has hurt the Dems, you haven’t been watching TV. I’ve caught a lot of news over the past weekend following Gustav and most Palin coverage has been fluff. Phluffy fluff pluff. Palin the daughter of the beautiful landscape of Alaska. Palin the brave crusader against corruption. Palin the mother of 5 beautiful children. Palin beloved by her neighbors. Blech. And my low-information friends were just eating it up with the Dems concerned about what a strong pick she was the the lone Republican determindly defending her.
Until – “BREAKING NEWS: Palin’s 17 yo daughter an unwed mother!” And then, BLAM, suddenly Palin is a joke to the Dems and the Republican suddenly wants to talk about other things. You may not like it, you may say it’s not fair, but babygate is what’s sinking Palin. If the babyswapping grandma rumors really forced the revelation of Bristol’s current pregnancy, then that rumor – true or false – was one of the biggest wins this century for the Dems.
Leave it to a conservative Republican – Lawrence Auster – to say it better than I – via Wolcott:
If you really believe we should back off, please read this open letter to Barack Obama from Jane Smiley of the HuffingtonPost. We should not back off! This is a legitimate debate!
Here is the post:
“Sarah Palin and her church and her pastor have made themselves abundantly clear on issues of reproductive privacy — there won’t be any. In a Palin world, if my daughter wanted birth control, she wouldn’t be able to get any, and if I wanted sex education to be taught in my son’s school, I would be out of luck. If a girl I knew were raped and impregnated by her uncle and she elected to have an abortion, she would not be allowed to do so. She wouldn’t even be allowed to take the morning after pill in case he got her pregnant. Maybe there’s something you guys don’t get about this. Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is at the heart of what women and the right wing have been fighting over for thirty years, and it isn’t abortion, it’s privacy and the right to control your own reproductive choices. There will always be abortion, and there will always be choice, but Palin would like the choice to be illegal and punishable. Same with birth control.
I like you, Barack, but you don’t get it either. The issues of birth control and abortion have been made into public issues by the right wing, and millions of women and girls have suffered because the right wing wants to impose its ideas of what women should do upon every woman in America including those who don’t share and have never shared their values. So, Barack, I suggest that you, as a man, should do the backing off.
Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, which her mother has known about for months, is at the heart of this battle. It has been shown over and over that abstinence education doesn’t work, while sex education does work. Do I accept that teenagers have sex? You bet I do, and I tell the ones I have borne how to make it safe and what to watch out for and be careful of, girls and boys. Sarah Palin, for whatever reason, did not do the same thing, and yet she presumes, PRESUMES, to tell me as a mother and a woman what I can and cannot do with my body, and what I can and cannot provide for my children.
Sarah Palin has constructed her appeal to the right wing around this “social conservatism” in exactly the same way that John McCain has constructed his appeal around his aggressive foreign policy views. Both are equally political, and as political as Cheney’s ideas about the unitary executive, for example. Women are citizens, too, and our privacy is a political football, and has been used as such to win elections for a generation, so I supposed you mean well, you guys who are telling me to back off, but you don’t get it. So shut up.”
Curt: She was wearing her engagement ring at the announcement Friday. Local media were aware of it but decided it wasn’t a story. It hardly seems like they were trying to keep it a secret. OTOH I can understand why they wouldn’t bring it up at the announcement.
This isn’t hurting Palin’s election chances in the least. In fact the blowback from trying to make it an issue will just damage Obama in the end. Obama’s statement on this should guide his supporters…
“I’m going into occasional lurker mode now, I’ll come back from time to time to see if things have settled down.
Adios amigos!”
Say it isn’t so, LeftTurn.
It is amazing how this topic has brought out a flood of namecalling you don’t normally see here — nothing serious, just silly stuff. Pretty amazing how polarizing the Palin pick has already become.
And just by the very nature of something that becomes polarizing, it doesn’t allow for much moderation. Kind of like I believe it was Gary who noted that abortion should be one of those sidebar topics since both sides never give an inch.
OCSteve: In fact the blowback from trying to make it an issue will just damage Obama in the end.
No one has to try to make it an issue. It just plain is one.
…that said, “Robin iin San Francisco”, it is not good blogging practice to cut-and-paste what someone else wrote into a comment, especially when you so sparely indicate it wasn’t you who wrote it and don’t link back to source.
Also, I haven’t so far liked or much agreed with anything that Jane Smiley has written about Sarah Palin so far, and I don’t like or agree with this. It isn’t, as the Republicans claim, “liberal blogs” that have made this an issue: it is Sarah Palin’s openly-expressed political views combined with her extremely poor handling of the unfortunate/ugly rumors around the birth of her fifth child. The net result has been a scandal that the worst elements of the mainstream media will dive into and exploit for all they’re worth: and it’s not “liberal blogs” that direct the media. Nor Barack Obama.
Principle from the Left
From Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings:As far as I’m concerned, it’s fair game to consider Sarah Palin’s statements about her daughter’s decision, and to compare them to her own views about abortion. That’s a story about whether or not Sarah Palin
The Telegraph has more
Sarah Palin and her church and her pastor have made themselves abundantly clear on issues of reproductive privacy — there won’t be any.
Look, it’s perfectly easy to discuss matters of reproductive privacy without bringing Palin’s kid into it. In fact, you will make a stronger point about reproductive privacy if you leave her the hell out of it.
The whole discussion obviously has its own momentum at this point. Pandora’s box is open.
But it is, simply, slimy to use Palin’s kid as an object lesson. She’s not running for anything, and her pregnancy neither justifies nor undermines her mother’s political views. She’s just a pregnant kid.
Thanks –
This is a wonderful post, Hilzoy. You have (at least partially) restored my faith in people after a very discouraging weekend.
I don’t care what anyone says, thank you for doing the decent thing. There are far too few people who have the grace to remember that whatever our political differences, we are all only human – and fallible.
For this, you have this conservative woman’s gratitude.
lj: I’m really not sure what point is served by publishing comments from the guy’s MySpace page. That’s some deep investigative journalism there.
Jes, I can’t find your original comment in the heap of comments. But AFAICR you said that she was in labour. What I read is that she trickled amniotic fluid, had a few contractions but they settled to 1 or 2 an hour. She also was in touch with her doctor along the way.
Had I been a few hours travel from home when the first signs of labour had shown themselves I would have wanted to travel home too. Giving birth in the environment you want can be very important for pregnant women. If it can’t be, it can’t be – but I’d sure give it a try if the riscs were acceptable. I don’t know what I would have done in her place, I have no idea how her other child deliveries went. But I am rather suprised that you, the person who normally is quite adament about women making their own decisions especially where pregnancy and babies are concerned, aren’t confident that Sarah Palin can make an informed decision.
If an ultrasound hasn’t detected big deformations there is not additional risc for DS children around birth. The things they are vulnerable for are diagnosed later, are tested or scanned for later, not right after birth.
lJ: Biden didn’t mention it, but both Barack and Beau did. Since I feel uncomfortable even discussing this much I don’t really want to have a discussion about what he did. I think he did a good thing, I just wanted to point out the difference in approach (Sarah Palin isn’t single, she has a husband – yet no one would ‘urge her’ publically to ‘serve’).
And puhlease…. are we now judging a candidate by the fact that her daughter dates a 17 yo jock who fishes out of season and didn’t want kids? Is Jerry Springer more respresentative of the US than I’d hoped and assumed?
Ara and DM, apologies for the link, I just thought it interesting that it was the Telegraph that put it out and I thought it underlined Jes’ point that it is not liberal blogs driving the coverage.
And dutch, we all now know about Biden’s first marriage, but one of my points was that it seemed remarkably long in surfacing. The second point was that the whole set of circumstances (after the election but before taking office, a widower who was only 4 years out of law school) makes your comparison a little less apt, though I don’t disagree with your fundamental point.
Marbel: Jes, I can’t find your original comment in the heap of comments. But AFAICR you said that she was in labour.
Yes, according to my ordinary understanding of “in labour” – her waters had broken. On an NHS health advice site, the advisor confirms your definition of labour – strong contractions – but also notes a number of situations in which an expectant mother shouldn’t wait to contact the maternity ward: number one is “If she suspects her waters (the amniotic fluid) have broken.” At that point, I believe, standard advice is to call your doctor/the midwife and ask “whether you should come in at once, wait a while, or call for an ambulance”.
There are multiple obvious reasons why airlines don’t like to transport passengers who are about to give birth. Sarah Palin obviously didn’t give a damn about any of that, and – that part is honestly admitted – did not inform Alaska Airlines that her waters had broken but she was sure it would be a day before she would deliver.
As I said: this medical decision was hers to make, in consultation – this late in pregnancy – with her doctor/midwife. And as her midwife could have been an Alaska Airlines flight attendant, if there was no one else on board who could help, it would have been fair, surely, to consult Alaska Airlines before proposing to travel 8 hours on their plane and potentially make use of their staff for duties they didn’t ordinarily sign up for.
Yes, I think that Sarah Palin ought to have been in control of all medical decisions made about her pregnancy/childbirth. I’m at a loss, though, as to what would have prevented that from happening if she’d checked into a hospital in Texas as soon as her speech was over.
Yes, I’m afraid so.
The term is Down Sybdrome, not Down’s.
Down’s syndrome is the British spelling.
Okay, I’m not the only one with this point of view about what we could ask of Palin.
McCain and Palin Recklessness All Around
Palin becoming pregnant at 44 was reckless.
Her chances of having a healthy child are very diminished at that age.
Then flaunting a Down Syndrome child as a badge of solidarity with the religious right is a new low in politics.
Now we are treated to the reality of what happens when dogma trumps biological facts.
A choice for the daughter?? In your dreams !!!
Her fate not her choice was dictated to her by her family.
Her choice went like this—You tart, you will marry that rotter, you will not bring a bastard into this family. —
God works in mysterious ways, for your penance, you will now be the main caretaker for your Down Syndrome brother while your mother is busy governing the little people.
I agree, using a 17yo to gain points is for trash media. Good post!
Down’s syndrome is the British spelling.
Down’s sybdrome is the cold spelling.
OCSteve: No way to know for sure whether this is good or bad for Obama, I guess. But in hours of news coverage over the weekend the only bad thing I saw about Palin was babygate stuff, and she’s plummeting in the polls. Something’s dragging her down, and I don’t see anything else that could be doing it. And in general personal smears have benefitted the other side. Can you mention some examples where the blowback clearly damaged the smearer? I can’t. Never mind the current situation, where the personal attacks are *not* coming from the Obama camp. Do you think McCain got blowback from Edwards getting chased and exposed? I don’t.
dutchmabel: Is Jerry Springer more respresentative of the US than I’d hoped and assumed?
Yes. Very much so. Remember why Anna Nicole Smith got so much coverage? Because stuff on her got killer ratings. There’s a very large segment of the population that has no interest whatsoever in abuse of power, political knowledge, or competent vetting. You can talk Troopergate and presidential qualifications all day and they’ll just change the channel. But if some unwed teenage relative has (or even better, *might* have had) a pregnancy, they are INTERESTED. And they may even pay attention to Troopergate while they’re following the family melodrama. These people do vote, although I’m sure at lower rates than political wonks, and in a closely divided country it’s very difficult to win an election if you cede them to the other side.
Just wondering how anyone posting here knows what was said to the daughter about her choices, marriage, contraception, or abortion? What conversations were held in this family about these topics? Clearly some people here have a thorough knowledge of this, or at least they’re pretending to.
Actually, I don’t expect an honest answer from people who just make this stuff up the way the want it to be without the need for any actual knowledge that that’s the way it is.
It’s amazing that these kinds of hateful spasms come from the side of the aisle that contains all the intelligence, wisdom, nuanced and deep thinkers, ethics, and sensitivities to teenage girls in difficult situations. Oh – they’re clairvoyant, too.
tamdar: Just wondering how anyone posting here knows what was said to the daughter about her choices, marriage, contraception, or abortion?
We don’t. We just know what Governor Palin says she thinks people ought to say to their daughters about marriage, contraception, and abortion – but you’re right: we have no idea if the Palin parents told their own children what they say other people should tell theirs.
Clearly some people here have a thorough knowledge of this, or at least they’re pretending to.
What Governor Palin says she believes is: teenagers shouldn’t be taught how to use contraception: girls shouldn’t be allowed to have abortions even if they’ve been raped: and no sex until marriage. Do you, then, think we should assume she’s speaking only for and to other people’s families, and not for her own?
(FWIW: tamdar, I do believe that we ought to assume that Palin is merely a pro-life politician who says what she needs to to get elected, with indifference to the suffering this will cause other peopl – not an inhuman monster who would force her “principles” on her own children regardless of the suffering this would cause them. I think that like most pro-life parents, she’d make exceptions for her own children, just like (like most pro-life women) she’d make exceptions for herself. I think better of her as a parent than her political speeches would make her, in other words.
I’ll be curious if someone can dig up any support for the statement that Sarah Palin believes kids shouldn’t be taught how to use contraception. That sounds hyoperbolic to me (and we all know that couldn’t possibly happen!). I think she’s more of the position that teaching young people aspects of sexuality is something to be approached by parents, not school systems.
While I disagree with her stance on abortion, she and her family have adhered to that position. You, nor any of the people here claiming to know, do not know or have any evidence that the decision was not the daughter’s. And while it is inconsistent to respect a choice when the preference is that there be no choice, this family has acted in accordance with its stated beliefs.
Hmm … no sex until marriage. What a horrible thing to encourage young people to consider! Clearly Sarah Palin has emotionally brutalized her daughter to even suggest such a thing!!
Sarah Palin is a joke! McCain lost this election the moment he nominated her!
oh, truth, how right you are. how foolish we were to sit around wasting our time with discussions of ethics, political impact, etc. we should’ve just decided what we wanted to happen! and then post it! with exclamation points! you are teh winnar!
I’ll be curious if someone can dig up any support for the statement that Sarah Palin believes kids shouldn’t be taught how to use contraception.
Sure. Here: Eagle Forum Alaska 2006 – a questionnaire sent to all the gubernational candidates, including Sarah Palin. Sent to, mind – so these aren’t spur-of-the-moment responses, but as considered and thoughtful as Sarah Palin gets.
“3. Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?”
Sarah Palin: “Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.”
I think she’s more of the position that teaching young people aspects of sexuality is something to be approached by parents, not school systems.
You feel, then, that although Sarah Palin says she believes in abstinence, she did in fact teach her children how to have sex safely when they chose to do so?
While I disagree with her stance on abortion, she and her family have adhered to that position.
No, she hasn’t. Sarah Palin’s stance on abortion is that women shouldn’t have the right to choose abortion. (See the Eagle Forum questionnaire, above.)
However, according to what she herself said yesterday, she and her family have not adhered to that position: she said her daughter chose to have the baby, so in fact, her daughter was allowed to make the decision for herself to have the baby or to have an abortion. Which is the right thing to do. To adhere to that position faced with her own child, would be inhuman.
Hmm … no sex until marriage. What a horrible thing to encourage young people to consider!
Certainly better than encouraging young people to think they have to get married to the first person they have sex with. Marriage is a legal committment that is intended to last a lifetime, after all. Or do you regard marriage as something that people ought to dash into on the spur of the moment, without serious consideration whether they’ve really met the right person to live with, love, and support for the rest of their lives?
I think she’s more of the position that teaching young people aspects of sexuality is something to be approached by parents, not school systems.
That is defensable, but rather beside the point. In fact, the whole idea here is precisely that most people don’t want the government making personal decisions for them. I’d say there is a huge difference between the supposed harm done by teaching sexuality from a biological POV in a school, vs outlawing all abortion. They just aren’t in the same category, but because they are both the product of inflexible religious tenents, they are equally important in the minds of some.
Running a diverse, modern State via a religious book is a world-historical failure several dozen times over. It doesn’t work, has never worked well, and causes more suffering and problems than it aleviates. Some smart people in the 18th century founded a country partially on that insight, a country which did pretty well until the last several years….
Honestly, this is going to sound quite hypacritical and or contradictory but her goes. I believe her private life including her children should be private. On the contrary, to me this folds into my decision making. Her is a woman with five children, one of whom is now expecting. It seems as though her role of becoming Govenor at a time when she should have been at home with her teenage daughter teaching abstinence it has interferred with her ability to parent efficiently. So what is too become of her other children in the next few months as she travels around campaigning. Then what is to become of them if she does make the presidency. Over the past 8 years we have all seen much more Dick than of the Bush. Then if something were to happen to Mr. 72 year old she is suppose to run our country when it’s obvious she isn’t making the best decisions as a parent. Why was the child holding her baby. As a parent, it seems at 4 months old you would be the one holding your new child and bonding with it and not on the road campaigning. Or could it be that it is either her grandchild or maybe now she resents the selfish choice of keeping this child.
Over the past 8 years we have all seen much more Dick than of the Bush.
Paging Mr. Thullen. Mr. John Thullen, please pick up the white courtesy phone…
Do I really care that Sarah Palin’s 17 year old daughter is pregnant? Of course not. Do I care that the Palin’s brought a down syndrome baby into the world? No. But they made the choice to do so. Why can’t women make the choice not to bring a sick child into the world if they choose not to? How many marriages break up because of it? Many. Why does the far right think that there way is the right way and no one else’s matter? Still working on that one.
I agree with the sentiment that the daughter herself is off limits.
I disagree to my core that every aspect of the candidate(s) judgment is off limits.
I’m a 56 year old woman that lived through the real bra burning rebellion to the real good old boys network. We were not even considered for traditionally male jobs.
To suggest that the candidate and her judgment is off limits is to insinuate women are still in some sort of softer class that must be treated differently than men.
To suggest that any male candidate (think Rick Santurum) who advertises himself as radically pro life, pro abstinence only sex education, that trots his family out as a main selling point would not get the same scrutiny is completely naive and a serious form of reverse sexism.
This woman chose to put herself in the national spotlight. By trotting out her family as a prop, she chose to put them under national scrutiny. The former was fine and wholly applaudable. The latter was the poorest judgment imaginable if she had any consideration for her daughter’s privacy at all.
If Palin knew the daughter was pregnant and she wanted to dive onto the national stage the simple solution would have been to enter the national stage ALONE or maybe just she and her husband. She still could have used the idea that she chose life for her last child, her daughter’s choice life for her illegitimate child as strong pro life family value walking of the talk. It would have completely cemented the hard right behind her and probably won some of the more conservative independents.
As it is, she and McCain chose to make a spectacle of her family opening the door to the vicious national media. That reflects the poorest judgment possible, both politically and morally.
I still think the way to approach all of this is via McCain and his kneejerk reactionary instincts. His initial poor judgment in picking this problem laden woman is the real issue and shouldn’t get lost in all the hoopla.
But please, as a woman who lived through those horrid times for women of early womens lib, do not use sexism as an excuse for not publically vetting this woman.
Support her efforts to gain a job in a traditionally male arena, but do not insist on favoritism or you defeat the very thing women have fought so long and hard for…equity…the good AND the bad of it.
Treat me just like you’d treat anyone else and let me be chosen for my own merits.
Paging Mr. Thullen.
No kidding. Moose burgers, Miss Congeniality, and a teen-age wedding.
Who else could make sense of this craziness?
John, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Thanks –
Jes: leaking amniotic fluid can happen when there is a little leak high up. It can go on for weeks even, but than you have to monitor carefully for infection. If there is more fluid loss, or if the pregnancy is close to term, they will usually induce labour after 24 hours if nature hasn’t started it yet. In the Netherlands of course, since that is the only system I am familiar with.
Also, in the last stage of pregnancy, you often have ‘false labour’. In Dutch we call them ‘practise contractions’.
That is why I state that we cannot judge her decision without knowing a lot more details about her previous birth experiences, the amount of amniotic fluid, how her contractions felt, etc.
Question: I have seen all candidates with their family/kids on stage when they spoke to the audience. Why is Sarah Palin doing that different? Do I miss something that might be obvious to you all and that looks like much of a muchness to me?
Looks like this thread is going to break the alltime record for length on this blog (spammed threads maybe excluded)
That is why I state that we cannot judge her decision without knowing a lot more details about her previous birth experiences, the amount of amniotic fluid, how her contractions felt, etc.
Actually, you know, I think we can. Because her decision was that she was going to fly from Texas to Anchorage. Eight hours in the plane, assuming no delays en route, leaking amniotic fluid… with absolutely no certainty that she would not give birth before she could get to a hospital.
You’d think she was in a foreign country and wanted to make sure her baby would be a natural-born citizen, in the common American misunderstanding of how citizenship may be transmitted.
Barack Obama is very smart in taking the high road and telling his supporters to lay off children of politicians. All of those republican supporters who harp on every microscopic flaw found on any democratic candidate should take note, but they don’t. They whine and pontificate and bluster their outrage without stop. To turn around and defend Sarah Palin and her questionable mothering talents and accuse Dems of attacking her poor helpless daughter is hypocrisy that is so mind-blowing, I can barely focus. The fact is, in most of the commentary I’ve seen today on the internet, even in the most liberal blog sites, very few are nasty towards the daughter. Liberals do not attack people for being human (although conservatives up until now, love to pin on the scarlet letter for every sin.) Valid criticism of Sarah Palin is this: How can you decide to accept a VP nomination when you have both a newborn Downs Syndrome child and you have vulnerable teenager about to give birth? Where would you find the time to be a VP in the next couple of years? Are you going to just hand your children over to a nanny, given the significant challanges your particular family has? Even if she was the father instead of the mother, should any person with those types of problems accept a VP of the US job? Should Edwards have run for Prez when his wife found out she had terminal cancer? I didn’t think so then, and when he was discovered to be having an affair, I saw what an idiot he was. What if he had won the nomination and the affair came out and destroyed Democratic chances? He was a sleazeball because he lacked values in failing to protect his wife’s health and putting her through a stressful camapign (and had a babe on the side, further hurting her profoundly). And Sarah Palin is a sleazeball because she knows what her daughter will go through with media scrutiny. And she knows her infant son will not get the type of intensive parenting he will need to achieve higher functioning. And for political reasons, to not miss out on giving a speech, she took the chance and gave “dry birth” many hours after her water broke. Dry birth is very dangerous and Down’s Syndrome children already have a higher stillbirth rate. Way to go in preserving your fetus. The woman is a questionable mother, although her shining mother image seemed to be her main attribute when she was presented onstage as the VP choice. She has little experience and qualifications beyond that now- tarnished image. Obama can take the high road with no problems because the Republicans have hung themselves.
apparently I have stumbled upon a democrat site rather than a discussion site. Being neither republican nor democrat I take offense at the “blame game” that I read here. Neither party is above using what ever “dirt” it thinks it may have to strike political points. However, the democratic candidate has repeatedly stated that his family is off limits and has now stated that all candidate’s families and especially children are off limits. So get a life, all of you, and look at what is really important to this contest. The future of your children is at stake. I pray that each of you will seek wise council as you prepare to cast your vote for the next president of these United States and that God’s hand will be upon the election process and results. God Bless America.
ladydoll: The future of your children is at stake.
Childfree, two cats, not American. OTOH, I just got a text from my just-16-years-old nephew thanking me for letting him know he is now old enough to have a moped. Damn, I was hoping he’d want to fly a hang-glider.
Don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
In 45 years on the planet, I’ve never read how “leaking amniotic fluid can happen when there is a little leak high up” — and I never thought I’d read it on ObWi first.
Mr. Thullen . . .
I have seen all candidates with their family/kids on stage when they spoke to the audience.
BTW, anyone else see the People Magazine photo of the McCain and Palin families? Notice anyone missing? Hint: she doesn’t quite look like all the other pale-skinned folk… I’m sure she’s enjoying being locked away in a “private school”.
Actually, you know, I think we can. Because her decision was that she was going to fly from Texas to Anchorage. Eight hours in the plane, assuming no delays en route, leaking amniotic fluid… with absolutely no certainty that she would not give birth before she could get to a hospital.
Jes, you have never given birth. Your understanding of ‘in labour’ was wrong (though breaking water often coincides with strong contractions). You have no idea what actual state she was in. You have no idea how her other childbirths went. She actually had to be induced to give birth the next day. She seems to have known her body and pregnancy symptoms better than you do.
With all the new commenters I have no idea who actually *is* a democratic supporter and who isn’t. But judging by the few whose leaning I know it seems that there is a hugh part of the democratic base who feel that women with children should not pursuit a demanding career. That might curb the enthousiam of mothers with ambitions to support the democratic party. Heck, I am a SAHM and I feel offended.
I don’t feel the need to attack Sarah palin via her children or via her ‘mothering skills’. I like the fact that Sarah Palin is a working mother and that she strives to make it easier to combine children with paid work or study. I admire that she fought against corruption in her own party at reasonable political riscs. And I like the fact that she played basketball 😉
On almost every other issue I care about she is abysmall. Healthcare, environment, abortion, sex-ed, gay rights, capital punishment, stem cell research, gun control, social security… So much to choose from – so why attack her in a way that is damaging for working women in the USA?
While I believe its’ Sarah Palins choice to run for VP, it is regretful that she has chosen to run for VP now. It seems obvious to me that if you have 5 children, one of which is a brand new baby with DS, one that is 17, pregnant and obviously going through her own trauma, and one that is an elementary school child, why would anyone in their right mind think that running for VP at this time is a wise decision? Where are her priorities? This person is a politician for god sake and I am sure she is familiar with the exposure politicians suffer being in a high political position. And yet she has the gall to ask people to respect her daughter’s privacy, after she chose to expose her 17 year old daughter’s private decisions? Why would she not wait until her life was in better order? One thing for sure……she has no common sense! I bet she has a Masters degree!
That’s all true, Marbel. And yet, every health advice page I can find does not say “Get on a plane and fly for 8 hours”: neither does this match up with what other women who (like you, unlike me) have experienced labour, say about her decision to risk giving birth on an Alaska Airlines flight.
so why attack her in a way that is damaging for working women in the USA?
I’m sorry, I don’t understand. How is it damaging to working women in the US to point out that if you know you are about to give birth, it’s really not a good idea to board a plane and fly for 8 hours/4000 miles?
Looks like this thread is going to break the alltime record for length on this blog
That would be Andy’s memorial thread.
This doesn’t really run a close second (thankfully), but it is damned long.
Thanks –
I think that politics should not focus on Bristols pregnancy. It’s bad enough that all this negative attention is focused on the poor girl. The choices a child makes cannot directly reflect on a parent. There are many childreen raised in very structured, loving, Christian homes that turn out to be felons. I’m sure Palin did the best she knew how with her daughter. Now this girl needs to be loved, supported and encouraged to be the best mother she can be.
But judging by the few whose leaning I know it seems that there is a hugh part of the democratic base who feel that women with children should not pursuit a demanding career.
I admit, I’m overwhelmed by the thread and trying to keep track of people who I read here and respect and newbies who are drop-ins is really hard, but I don’t think that is the case. It is the conflict with McCain (and the media) telling us how important the VP job is, and now refusing to acknowledge that someone like Palin is woefully underqualified. Sure, things get out of hand, but, as I mentioned to Redstocking Grandma, a lot of this is really primal rage steam getting blown off. The regulars here take the election in particular and politics in general pretty seriously, and the choice of Palin is like someone being invited to a wedding, and showing up in shorts and flip flops with no excuse. And when one complains, getting told ‘what’s the matter, have you got something against shorts and flip flops?” And being at its heart, a response from anger, meeting it with anger or moral superiority doesn’t really advance things very far.
Classy. Very classy. You’re an inspiration for conservative bloggers to respond in kind. Thank you for giving us a reason not to dehumanize the all on the left, and for liberals not to dehumanize all on the right. We’re all human beings, and we all get furious when our opponents dehumanize us. Bless you.
Anybody watch the premier of 90210? 😉
Hillary Clinton said that it takes a village to raise a child. I’m waiting for her to voice strong support for Governor Palin’s daughter, and encourage America to give this young girl a helpful and friendly atmosphere to raise her baby to be strong, healthy, and successful, instead of villifying her mother in the press because she didn’t force her daughter to abort her baby, or kick her out of the house.
Guest: instead of villifying her mother in the press because she didn’t force her daughter to abort her baby, or kick her out of the house.
Where has this happened? McCain’s campaign cancels an appearence on Larry King, the easiest gig around, when an anchor questions their talking points. What makes you think that they wouldn’t love to pounce on the media over something like you refer to? As bad as they can be sometimes, the media isn’t stupid that dumb.
Thank you. You have shown real class.
I agree that her daughter should be off limits, but then Palin should not be speaking of her son that is going to Iraq just to gain talking points. She can’t have it both ways.
How does Sarah Palin’s daughter being pregnant hinder her ability to become VP? You people are all petty if you ask me. Obama has done nothing for IL the entire time he has been in office…do we really want this man to become president??
Chelsea Clinton was an honor roll student who was hounded for her LOOKS, not her behavior. There is absolutely no comparison between her situation and Bristol’s.
I find it appalling that the public no longer holds parents responsible for their children or their children’s behavior. I am the parent of two children, the same age as Sarah’s Bristol and Willow, and there is no doubt in my mind that I am responsible for them and their behavior as long as they are minors. I wouldn’t let myself off that hook; why should I let someone who thinks she is fit to be my vice president off the hook?
Sarah Palin has a history of poor judgment. She was pregnant with her first son when she got married. She took outrageous health risks with a baby she knew had Down’s Syndrome. She became pregnant while she was governor, a high intensity job that does not leave room for the demands of a healthy newborn, let alone one with special needs. There is no indication she ever parents the baby, and I read an interview where she bragged that her 7 yo does most of it. Children with Downs need intensive occupational therapy, most of which is best done by their mothers. They need this in the first few years of life, and it can not be delayed. She has no time to meet his essential needs, and now she is trying for another, more important, job?
The fact that she allowed her daughter to date a boy who is the epitome of oil field trash, (have you seen his MYSpace page?) and thinks it is a good idea for Bristol to now marry the creep, is reason enough to believe she is incapable of making a sound decision. If she can’t look out for her own children, what she going to do to us?
The argument has been made that if she ware a man none of this would be at issue, Not true. I can name a number of elections where men came under harsh scrutiny because they had a wife or child who was ill. There is a new double standard where Sarah Palin is escaping the same sort of scrutiny because she is a woman – and she represents the family values preachers. Well, I am a life long atheist and I have more family values than her entire bible thumping family of hypocrites will ever have. She and everyone who defends her make me want to puke.
I’d sooner vote for Britney Spears’ mother, and that is no joke.
As a FORMER McCain supporter/contributor, I draw your attention to a post earlier, as I think it’s a brilliant assessment of the situation, i.e.,
“Respectfully I think most of you are missing the larger point in all these family matters. McCain and his judgment and his campaign tactics is the main point.
McCain either did not vet this woman and acted completely recklessly in his first big executive decision OR McCain knew about all this and didn’t care about the kid being thrown to the media wolves at all.
Neither of those leads us to believe he should be leader of the free world.
McCain and his campaign chose to trot this family out as a paradigm of family values, chose to draw Palin as a virtue of reform when it turns out not so much, chose to use this family to energize his followers because he couldn’t.
If McCain had chosen to simply introduce Palin as a young, learning, very promising young new face for the party as he would like to see it grow, none of this would have been an issue. If he had introduced her as having a daughter in a tight position but supported by her family none of this would have been an issue. If he had introduced her honestly as having come from small town (Alaska is a small town in it’s entirety) politics and all the foibles that go with that, none of this would have been an issue.
Instead McCain tries to schmooze her through as a virtuous gun toting Christian ethicist.
McCain insulted our intelligence and by lying and misrepresenting this woman and her family to us, he threw them under the bus long before any resultant gossip about them will.”
~~~~~
From my own perspective, I lost all respect for John McCain when I learned that he knew that Bristol Palin was pregnant. So he, Cindy McCain, and the Palins were responsible for Bristol being forced to hug the baby and a blanket so that the public might not recognize she was pregnant and ruin the big campaign day. Over the weekend it got worse as Bristol was left in the bus with the baby while everyone else got to go to the rally. I know this because C-SPAN televised the rally and Sarah’s introduction of her family, which explained Bristol’s absence.
Folks, this is like the wicked step-sisters in Cinderella with Bristol as Cinderella and John, Sarah, Cindy, and Todd the wicked step-sisters.
This has been done in the name of John McCain’s blind ambition. For a man who writes so much about honor, this shows that he has none. And this should make every adult in America sick.
I, for one, will no do everything in my power to make certain that John McCain suffers the biggest loss in presidential election history.
In short, don’t run away from the story, just reframe it.
and the choice of Palin is like someone being invited to a wedding, and showing up in shorts and flip flops with no excuse.
More like showing up on a wedding and getting judged for leaving her kids with her husband. After all, who could expect him to do a good job? I’m waiting till the democrats start trashing her for having tried marihuana…
It’s been only a few years since Dutch members of the house were allowed to find replacement during maternity leave. We had to change the constitution to make that possible, but it was deemed important in making it more accessible for younger woman and we wanted them to be politically involved. In our 150 member parlement we now have 60 women and our current government has 16 men and 11 women in it. Those things matter to me ;). Though we are not as far as Spain it is not unthinkable anymore. The Netherlands used to be horrible in womens lib, these days we are decent and these rolemodels are important. That is why I hate it when female politicians are attacked on their femininity instead of on the issues – that is bad for all women.
Early in the morning, I should have previewed. I hope the italics are gone now.
I don’t want to hear another word about Sarah Palin’s daughter. It’s her pastor that’s important:-)
— TP
Marbel: I still don’t agree with you over the thing about the birth flight.
But you have presented the most cogent, clearly argued, realistic case that I have yet read why everything in Sarah Palin’s account could be true and it still wasn’t a ridiculously reckless thing to do.
Want to gather up what you wrote here, scattered across several comments, post it as a single comment here, and I’ll link to it as an update? You have presented a good case – a much better one than the other people commenting positively at my blog – and I feel it would be fair to present it as an alternate POV. Thanks.
Dutch,
You misunderstand my point. I said
and the choice of Palin is like someone being invited to a wedding, and showing up in shorts and flip flops with no excuse.
Choosing a person with as little experience as Palin is the insult. To try another analogy, it’s as if you sat down to play a game of chess with someone, and the person, rather than actually playing, just randomly moved the pieces. Or playing a game of darts and you are trying to play your best, and the other side randomly throws the three darts anywhere and then, when you complain that you are being serious about the game, tries to argue that the random throwing of three darts is an actual strategy. The problems with these analogies is that chess and darts are games with rules, and if someone chooses to make a mockery of the rules in such a way, they would lose. But the Republicans are trying to redefine the game as it is being played.
I see phrases concerning the argumentation like ‘they can’t be serious’ and ‘is this an actual argument?’ Foreign policy experience based on the border with Russia? A woman who did not have a passport until 2007 and claims to have been to Ireland when the plane just stopped to refuel there? Visits the troops in Kuwait and Landstuhl and calls that foreign policy experience? The same things occur with executive experience, with claims to be a reformer, spouse in the AIP, and on and on. As McCain’s advisor just said to the WaPo, ‘this campaign is not about the issues’. It is this bait and switch has created a huge amount of anger and you meeting that anger with anger about sexism is missing the point.
It is like the story of the dripping faucet. Imagine this faucet that is going drip drip drip in the background and it really gets on the nerves, but it can’t be fixed, but it keeps dripping. When the person explodes because they can’t take the faucet anymore, they are not going to start screaming at the faucet, they are going to scream at the spouse, the kids, the dog, something else is going to bear the brunt. Because you can’t yell at the dripping faucet. We can’t yell at McCain, or the Republican party, or Palin (though if she gets in front of the press, it is going to make every press conference seem like a love fest, I predict), so things bubble over. While ObWi threads tend to drift, the convolutions in these Palin threads seems just like when someone gets so angry that instead of articulating the reasons, they end up blowing up.
I’m going to try and write something at TiO about how to address the anger that people feel inside, the anger that you are trying to address with your own anger, but for this comment I am suggesting that it would be a lot better overall for you to simply note the problem, rather than trying to stretch it into a larger comment on the misogyny in American society in general or this commentariat in particular. Especially when you have eschewed identifying particular comments, and simply made claims about the majority for the comments of a few. Most of the names popping up here are unfamiliar to me, and tarring me and the other regulars because of the actions of people following a link and blowing off steam is a mistake. And some of the denunciations are so OTT that I think of a number of them as trolling. Or certainly of being so unfamiliar to me that I am not going to spend my time engaging with them until they prove that they are participating in good faith. Is it all that difficult for you to do the same?
Sorry that should be
Palin (though if she gets in front of the press, it is going to make every [other hostile] press conference seem like a love fest, I predict)
MeDrewNotYou – Aw, thanks!
Guest: “. I’m waiting for her to . . . encourage America to give this young girl a helpful and friendly atmosphere to raise her baby to be strong, healthy, and successful,”
Of course, what you want to look at here is liberal/progressive policy and efforts, since we’re often the people who push for things like the FMLA and all sorts of policies aimed at supporting parents and children. (with a respectful nod to all other conservatives, etc. who do walk the walk).
“instead of villifying her mother in the press because she didn’t force her daughter to abort her baby, or kick her out of the house.”
Who do you think has been doing this, Guest? What we’re mostly complaining about – those of us who are, as opposed to asking for deeply principled respect for the family’s privacy – is that Sarah Palin wants to take away from other people’s daughters the very choice her daughter presumably got. We respect her daughter’s choice, and wish Bristol and her family all the best in this matter; we just want her mother to do the same for everyone else’s family.
Jes: I’ll try. But I in that case I might have to add something about how essential leukemia testing right after birth is for a DS child…
LJ: This post is about Palin and her children, not about Palin and her experience. If it was the latter I’d stay away from the discussion, since I thought experience (both general and in foreign politics/cultures) was/is one of Obama’s weak points and I don’t feel like adressing the whole pilo-on that statement would cause. Suffice to say that I think Obama/Biden is better than McCain/Palin imho and if I was an American voter in a swing state I would definately vote for Obama. If I didn’t live in a swing state I would vote Green, since I am definately not enthousiastic about Obama and I’d definately like the Democratic Party to stop wooing the Consevatives and ignoring the women.
Especially when you have eschewed identifying particular comments, and simply made claims about the majority for the comments of a few.
In an earlier thread I commented upon the sexism and someone (KCinDC??) asked me for cites. So I tried to collect them, but even if I leave out the names it’s still too long a list to post as a comment. And due to being in a different time-zone (and rather busy, the new schoolyear has started and we are stacked with new things to do or be informed about) it is hard to respond to everybody, even if I’d want to try that.
I also don’t know many of the newer ‘regulars’ because I’ve been less involved lately. So I tend to look for the names I’ve seen regularly in the past and get a feel for what they comment.
As McCain’s advisor just said to the WaPo, ‘this campaign is not about the issues’. It is this bait and switch has created a huge amount of anger and you meeting that anger with anger about sexism is missing the point.
I (and many women) actually still carry a lot of anger about the sexism and mysogeny of our so-called allies. But that is another discussion.
Sexism is always wrong. I don’t expect much better from the redneck rightwing, but the lefties and progressives are supposed to agree with that. Or rather that is what I assumed till the beginning of this year. But even now I still think that progressives (Democrats) ought to strive for economic independence of women, equal treatment, creating an environment where women and men can have a family and have a career. Trashing that to make a cheap politial point is bad behaviour – trashing that when there are many more honorable options to make that political point is both bad and stupid.
“I also don’t know many of the newer ‘regulars’ because I’ve been less involved lately”
Most of the people on this thread aren’t “regulars” of any sort, but are drive-bys from various linkings, mostly from right-wing sites who liked the notion of the post, including by Instapundit; this thread long ago became a toxic waste dump of incoherency and trolls, which is why I quit posting to it some time ago. Just saying I wouldn’t waste your time; not many regulars are reading it, either.
Marbel: But I in that case I might have to add something about how essential leukemia testing right after birth is for a DS child…
I’m fine with that, too, you know.
You people are all petty if you ask me
nobody asked.
Jeff: Hint: she doesn’t quite look like all the other pale-skinned folk… I’m sure she’s enjoying being locked away in a “private school”.
She was front and center at the convention last night. In fact, they were highlighting her just about the time you hit post…
Gary: Just saying I wouldn’t waste your time; not many regulars are reading it, either.
Well, there is a certain entertainment value to be had…
Gary: yeah, but I’m used to not being read much. Many obwi threads have my name under the last comment of the thread 🙂
LJ: I thought I might have to expand a bit on why I think it is stupid.
Democrats usually profit from high voter turnout. If you want Obama to win (or want McCain to loose) you want as many people as you can reach out to vote for the democratic party. Especially women, since the majority of Democratic voters is female. You may assume that women will on the whole vote for Obama because the alternative is worse (OMG Roe, Scotus!). But it would be much better and reliable if they were actually enthousiastic and wanted to vote *for* the Democratic ticket.
Both Obama and Biden are not great in feminist issues. The Obama supporters have been worse the past months. Voting in the US allready is harder than in a lot of democratic countries. Do you really want to help the right-wing discourage as many women as you can to vote?
This post is about Palin and her children, not about Palin and her experience.
So it is the post you are upset about and not those who are commenting? Because here is what you wrote
But judging by the few whose leaning I know…
And then in your last comment, you say
So I tried to collect them, but even if I leave out the names it’s still too long a list to post as a comment.
few, too long a list, the post, the comments, it all seems very contradictory.
I think identifying the sexism in comments that are made without thinking is important. But there is, as Gary notes, a lack of regulars here, and when I try to tell you that they aren’t regulars, as I have several times, you say, well, I haven’t been around, so they must have been newer regulars.
It really sounds to me that you don’t really really want to toss out the data that supports your argument, even if we tell you that they aren’t regulars. That tells me that your anger at the content of the comments is overriding your ability to judge whether the data reflects what you think it does.
You would have us not point out any of the problematic points of Palin because we know so little about her, and if we don’t give her every benefit of the doubt, we are succumbing to sexism. So, Palin may conceivably have enough executive experience, but McCain didn’t know that, so that’s where the problem is. Or Palin may be able to learn conversation Russian in the 2 months before she takes office and gaze into Putin’s soul, but McCain doesn’t know that, so that’s where the problem is. However, we can see von, in other comments, is suggesting that McCain did do due diligence in the vetting, even though it may have only taken 24 hours. So, by adopting a do not analyze anything about Palin standard in order to prevent sexism, we then focus on the process of vetting and, since McCain says he vetted her, everything is fine. I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine that sort of self handicapping to be worthwhile at all. You are the squad leader advising your entire squad to only shoot if they are going to hit the target and then roundly criticizing the entire squad if any one of them misses the target. Or if any of the other members of other squads who happen to end up in your area happen to miss, even though the other side doesn’t follow those rules.
The reason I point this out is that you are a regular and I have this sinking feeling that you are going to carry this forward into other discussions (and we will have them, especially if Palin doesn’t get dropped from the ticket) and you are going to leave being convinced of the utter misogyny of those who comment here. And you are going to be completely wrong.
Sorry, that was in response to the previous comment, not your last one. I’d be happy to continue this discussion, but I think it needs to be conducted in a different place with a clean slate, so people can take responsibility for what is said rather than having drop in comments poison the atmosphere. The comments may be trolling, they may be people who actually are not thinking about how their responses are sexist. But either way, whether they be trolls or true expressions, holding the regulars responsible for the content of those comments or being upset that the regulars are not addressing these points makes no sense whatsoever.
Some of these comments really amaze me. McCain vetted her just fine. He didnt decieve us by not telling us about Sarah Palin’s daughters pregnancy. BECAUSE its none of our business. Duhhhhhhh
I think identifying the sexism in comments that are made without thinking is important. But there is, as Gary notes, a lack of regulars here, and when I try to tell you that they aren’t regulars, as I have several times, you say, well, I haven’t been around, so they must have been newer regulars.
No, I just say I don’t address them, I don’t reply to them, I don’t count them. I only take account of the comments from people whose name I recognize. But I’ve you are really interested in my attempts to make a list of sexist statements from the palin introduction threads:
I’ll take this up at TiO.
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2008/09/midway-for-obama.html
Midway For Obama.
For those of you who say people don’t know what arrangements the Palins have made for child care — that is exactly the issue. If they decided to have five children and one is only 4 months old, should Sarah take care of her own children. Why did she have kids. It is one thing to have a day job and come home at night, but to run for V.P. of the United States which involves traveling and long hours, wouldn’t it be better for her to be their for her children, maybe then they won’t be having sex at such a young age.
All that typing and nothing about any issue that affects our country. I bet you peek in your neighbors windows and believe its your right to know whats going on in there.
Do you really want to help the right-wing discourage as many women as you can to vote?
Well yeah. Except for the PUMAS.
I bet you peek in your neighbors windows and believe its your right to know whats going on in there.
waitwaitwait… you’re a Republican, and you just said this ?
BTW the Dems are known abusers of women. So please ladies keep saying to yourselves: “but they really love me”.
OKYDOAK.
Nothing like a good bamboozling to make you feel good in the morning.
Did I mention I’m a pro choice Republican?
For those of you who say people don’t know what arrangements the Palins have made for child care — that is exactly the issue. If they decided to have five children and one is only 4 months old, should Sarah take care of her own children. Why did she have kids. It is one thing to have a day job and come home at night, but to run for V.P. of the United States which involves traveling and long hours, wouldn’t it be better for her to be their for her children, maybe then they won’t be having sex at such a young age.
Yep. Those mean Republicans will never let her take her infant with her. They are so EVIL.
Well I’m tired of the fever swamps. Ta Ta.
BTW the Dems are known abusers of women.
What The Fuhk ?
dutchmarbel,
I looked up the comments you listed. I don’t think most of them are sexist at all. In many of these cases, I think you failed to pick up on sarcasm that is pretty obvious to native speakers. For example, when The Original Francis wrote “Why is a mother of five, with her youngest both disabled and still an infant, abandoning her family? What kind of traditional family values does that demonstrate?”, you neglected to mention that this bit was preceded by the statement that Palin is ripe for ratfscking, which suggests that the parts you did quote were meant to be taken as a commentary on how Republicans would treat Palin if she was a Democrat VP nominee. That probably only makes sense if you know what ratfscking means and have studied US history in enough detail to understand it.
Alternatively, consider jonnybutter’s comment that said “Maybe McCain can offer Palin up to compete with Cindy in the Miss Buffalo Chip ‘pageant’ in NV. It’s what the country needs! MORE PANTOMIMED SEX ROLES! Boys should have names like ‘Trick’ and ‘Trig’! Masculine names! And more pickles! Say no more, say no more, wink wink.” Where is the sexism here? He’s using sarcasm pretty heavily to critique the fact that McCain, a man who believes in traditional gender roles, might not be fully committed to women’s rights, especially given the traditionalist nature of Palin’s views. Do you disagree with that? And Ugh’s comment about the Princess Bride is a joke about McCain.
I can’t see any sexism at all in some of the comments you cited. For example, when russell wrote “If you think of it as a marketing strategy, she’s actually a pretty clever one. There are, today, millions of Americans who are saying to themselves, “I’m not sure I like McCain, but that Palin is one spunky little filly!”. Or, something to that effect.”, he was talking about how some voters would perceive her. I think his assessment is correct; certainly, the McCain campaign’s efforts to promote her push these aspects of her identity heavily. So how is it sexist to comment on the ways in which Palin is presenting herself to voters?
Alternatively, consider Carleton Wu’s comment “But who knows, maybe she charms America and changes the conversation”…where is the sexism here? Do you understand that in American the word charm does not have strictly female connotations, especially in a political context? Another example would be Tony P writing that “Womanhood? Check — just look at her 5 kids! Potential problem: do contemporary American women really identify with a mother of five?”…is it now sexist to note that most women in American have far fewer than 5 children and might have difficulty empathizing with someone who did have five children? If so, why?
I do agree that some of the comments you cited are clearly sexist; the bit about caring for a child on 9/11 for example. But many are not. If you are misreading so many comments, then I can see why you might think everyone here is a sexist. But, um, a little humility might be helpful.
Tio thread here
“Both Obama and Biden are not great in feminist issues. ”
Um, what are you talking about? I have a long post on Obama on that score I’ve been meaning to do, and obviously.
“The Obama supporters have been worse the past months.”
Wait, wtf?
All of the hype about Sarah Palin’s family tells me how desperate the Democratic party is. She is a breath of fresh air, and I would bet that not many of the people who are slandering her, have perfect children or lives. The more I hear, the more I support her. This is going to backfire on the people who are doing unethical things. I have recruited several of my Democratic fiends and family to John McCain’s side in the last few days. I will be snding a campaign contribution to him today.
“But I’ve you are really interested in my attempts to make a list of sexist statements from the palin introduction threads”
Yeah, there are a ton of rightwing trolls out there. This isn’t news.
NOW, the National Organization for Women will be calling for a National Boycott of US Magazine. Their continued sexist comments towards Sarah Palin is absolutely disgraceful! I have cancelled my subscription and have urged my corporate headquarters marketing department to cancel our advertising indefinitely in US Magazine and urge other clients to do the same.
I am a life-long democratic woman who supported Hillary Clinton along with 18 million others. I keep hearing Democratic strategists declaring that we “disgruntled Hillary supporters” will not vote for McCain simply because he chose a woman to be his VP. But this is NOT TRUE!
I along with thousands of other Hillary supporters WILL be voting for McCain and Sarah Palin because we WANT to see a woman as VP and voters like myself see it as a brilliant move by McCain to reach out to us women voters.
The TVangelists threaten us of Roe V Wade being overturn but fail to mention that both Bush administrations were Pro-Life and women still have the right to chose.
When Colorado Democratic Party leader Billy Compton intimidated Sacha Millstone asking her to resign as a Delegate because she had second thoughts on Obama was outrageous! When the sexist/racist Emil Jones called Delmarie Cobb who supported Hillary an “Uncle Tom” infuriates us women!
I am asking other Democratic women to join us in sending a message to our Democratic Party Leadership that THEY do not chose our Nominee by intimidating elected Delegates into voting for THEIR choice.
To smhbd:
I agree with all my heart. BTW I am also a Pro Choice Republican. I am not that worried about this issue. I dont think they can overturn Roe v. Wade. I am pro life and pro choice. I believe it is a womans right to choose.
I am much more worried about the economy and the place out country fits in the world. I want someone with McCains character running our country. And having a Maverick like Palin at his side is such a bonus.
I think this is the smartest thing John McCain has done. He will now get my vote. This woman and her family are what we the voters have been trying for 40 years to get into office. Some one with some drive and guts who is not a wealthy Washington insider. With this move I say there is much more than meets the eye in McCain he will be no Bush (Thank God) and he might just be man enough to clean up Bush’s mess!
It kills me the press is making such a big deal about her 17 year old daughter being knocked up or about her husbands 20 year old DUI. At least he never killed any one like a certain Mass. senator who was never charged.
people need to look into the lives of the press and see what is there or the lives of other political people such as Obahma’s wives papers that are being hidden by a certain collage. Why are they not made public so everyone can see the true person sitting closest to the man running for president. THINK! THINK! THINK!
By the way, in case anyone had any doubts about “Julie”, the comment dated September 03, 2008 at 11:14 AM is boilerplate, available in identical form at multiple other blogs. I just confirmed by googling. Presumably one of McCain’s “PUMAs”.
In response to dutchmarbel’s list of sexist comments from regulars, Gary you write, “Yeah, there are a ton of rightwing trolls out there. This isn’t news.”
The point she was making was that these weren’t from recently arrived right-wing trolls. She specifically mentioned that.
Further examples:
Tony P is a right wing troll? I always kind of pictured him as left-wing. link
When Jesurgislac thought that quote was from ME she thought it sounded pretty sexist.
There is the weird focus on how a woman with a DS kid could possibly have a job as VP which comes up again and again and again.
Turbulence seems to initially flirt with sexism here with an implicit assumption that caregiving questions are very important for a female/mother political candidate, though after much browbeating by Jesurgislac he suggests that he would have the same concerns for a man running for office.
And then the ones that dutchmarbel quotes, at least half of them from people we see around here pretty regularly.
And that is HERE. In sorta-not-fly-off-the-handleville
dm,
Alternatively, consider Carleton Wu’s comment “But who knows, maybe she charms America and changes the conversation”…where is the sexism here? Do you understand that in American the word charm does not have strictly female connotations, especially in a political context?
I will vouch for me on this. 🙂 Remember, Im also the guy who was saying that criticism of Palin as a parent for her daughter’s pregnancy smacked of sexist bc I doubted a male candidate would be judged so personally responsible for a child’s behavior. If you were reviewing those threads you must’ve come across that as well, and decided that I didn’t deserve any benefit of the doubt regardless.
Furthermore, taking language that would be unremarkable if referring to a male and claiming that it’s sexist when used on a female is sexist. It demands a lower bar for female candidates, or puts matters discussing them on different footing. Googling “Obama charm” gives me about 2.3M hits btw…
people need to look into the lives of the press and see what is there or the lives of other political people such as Obahma’s wives papers that are being hidden by a certain collage
They covered her papers up with other papers in an artistic manner?
Seriously, if this isn’t another “whitey” rumor, you could make explain wtf you’re talking about. If you feel like it. Just think of all the McCain points you could be earning!
people need to look into the lives of the press and see what is there or the lives of other political people such as Obahma’s wives papers that are being hidden by a certain collage
They covered her papers up with other papers in an artistic manner?
Seriously, if this isn’t another “whitey” rumor, you could make explain wtf you’re talking about. If you feel like it. Just think of all the McCain points you could be earning!
There is the weird focus on how a woman with a DS kid could possibly have a job as VP which comes up again and again and again.
Seb, why weird? I think that anyone who is a parent wonders, even if they have perfectly healthy kids, what they would do if it weren’t the case. When my daughter was hospitalized with an unknown disease that seemed to not go away and would have really affected the quality of her life, I spent a lot of time thinking what would my wife and I would do. I’m trying hard not to judge Palin on this, but it is very hard for me to understand what the thought process is to accept the nomination.
I also have the impression that it is more the drop in commentators that have initiated the DS discussions, and regulars have entered in response, but that is just my impression.
Also, when I first looked at the thread, your comment stopped at “Turb flirted with sexism”, but on preview, there is another paragraph. No problem, but just wondering if this is a software fluke, or if you went back and added the link to make it clear. Turb made it clear that he has first hand experience dealing with someone with DS, so, just like OCSteve’s comments, that should be taken into account. If the focus is on the person with DS, it seems logical to assume that Turb would take the same attitude towards a cavalier father.
At any rate, the fact that it is only half the cited comments that were from regulars (with many of the comments by the regulars were explained by Turb) seems to undercut Dutch’s point. I’d also point out that while some might be defined as regulars, some of them commented once or twice a month, and then BOOM multiple comments in single threads in August, which corresponds to the two conventions. Comments made in an atmosphere of increased passion shouldn’t be taken as perfect mirrors of the underlying thought processes of the commenters, I believe.
“whitey” huh? I wonder — ooo you a racist?
“At any rate, the fact that it is only half the cited comments that were from regulars (with many of the comments by the regulars were explained by Turb) seems to undercut Dutch’s point.”
I can’t give you that one. The fact that half of the cited comments do seem to be from regulars seems to make Dutch’s point. I don’t expect sexist comments from pretty much any of the regulars.
“Comments made in an atmosphere of increased passion shouldn’t be taken as perfect mirrors of the underlying thought processes of the commenters, I believe.”
That however I’ll give you. But the flip side of that is that increased passion can often be like drinking–revealing because it removes the inhibitions.
“Also, when I first looked at the thread, your comment stopped at “Turb flirted with sexism”, but on preview, there is another paragraph. No problem, but just wondering if this is a software fluke, or if you went back and added the link to make it clear.”
When I posted it initially I left one of the quotation marks out of the html tag which cut everything out after the initial tag error. I added the quotation mark symbol in the html and the rest of the comment reappeared.
Thanks for the explanation, I thought there was something wrong with my set…
Stop by TiO for more discussion if you want, (as well as inviting any regulars to explain their thoughts, one has already dropped by, collect the full set!) as we still seem to have people trying to get their McCain decoder rings…
“Stop by TiO for more discussion if you want”
My password stopped working and I haven’t had time to figure out why. I’m going on vacation for a week in about 12 hours. 🙂
My gosh. OK I just have to comment on the family issue. I have been trying to avoid it because it shouldnt be an issue but it seems to be. I am sure Palin has a large support group. Her husband obviously is very capable of taking care of the family. Possibly you men didnt do your share in raising the kids or dont do your share in raising the kids but it seems they have managed to do it all.
I know I know……at this point you would bring up the daughters pregnancy. Well, other than locking teenages in a closet until they are 25 these things happen sometimes. And I really doubt that Mom and Dad were there when it happened.
What is it to anyone other than their immediate family, friends, extended family. Do you think it should be your boss’s business How you are able to handle work and family? No of course not. I even think it might be discrimination. Oh, and against the labor laws to even ask how many children you have when applying for a job. Or gee, even asking how old you are.
Yikes!! And McCain has 7 kids……. Ya know. Maybe having a large family actually should be considered as having experience handling the children of Congress.
The fact that half of the cited comments do seem to be from regulars seems to make Dutch’s point
Except that most of the comments turn out to either not be sexist at all or attempts at sarcasm, humor, reports of sexism by others, attempts to show how the GOP would portray Palin if the tables were turned, etc. A few were directly sexist in an unacceptable way (and Id be surprised if those were by regulars, but since there’s no names or links I can’t tell). The rest seem like an attempt to pad out the list and justify her (IMO baseless) feeling that Democrats and Obama have been anti-woman.
OK, Sebastian, let me know when you get back if you need help
Congratulations Republicans, this shows how clueless you really are.
You bring forward a candidate who diverts attention away from ISSUES because her 17 year old daughter is knocked up. Evangelicals are hypocrits if they vote for her. She raised a daughter who had sex outside of marriage – last time I checked that is a huge NO-NO for evangelical christians. So why are you so excited about her?
Is Rush on pills again? Oh wait – he is a Christian so he is forgiven for being a two-faced idiot.
I have one kid – not 5. No way in hell I could juggle kids and the vice presidency of the United States, and any woman who votes for her because of her gender is a idiot.
So let’s focus on the issues and not her daughter’s pregnancy. She is governer of a state funded by oil, she doesn’t have to worry about keeping her economy going. If she wants a new highway built – one wave of a magic oil wand and it happens.
I fail to see what she has done or will do to earn my respect as a v.p. I could care less that she is a woman – I am not comfortable with her being that close to running the free world. Sorry.
Cathy:
Obviously you have already made up your mind. BTW “knocked up” is not a nice way to talk. Is that how you referred to yourself…where you knocked up. And as far as you not being able to handle one child and the VP position. Well … Gee… I guess we wont be voting for you then. We want someone who CAN handle it.
Sorry
lj,
I’m having trouble logging on to Taking It Outside.
Anyway, dutchmarbel, guilty as charged: I laughed at the Maher joke.
And, yes, the morning of 9-11 might have been the most extreme situtation I could think of, but realizing working mothers — my wife is one — have enough on their plate, I do wonder how challenging it would be to be the President of the United States while the nation was under attack and taking care of the needs of a 5-month-old baby. (There was no sarcasm or snark intended there.)
Cathy Raymond just said: “I have one kid – not 5. No way in hell I could juggle kids and the vice presidency of the United States, and any woman who votes for her because of her gender is a idiot.”
I think it’s fair to recognize that President of the United States isn’t an ordinary job, if you will.
(lj: I got the activation link mailed to me and thought I did as instructed, creating my password, etc. Perhaps you have to wait longer than an hour for it to take hold? Any ideas? BTW, I admire the stamina you and Jes are showing sticking with this thread — every time I look at Recent Comments, “Children of Sarah Palin” appears again; the Energizer Bunny would be proud.)
I want someone with McCains character running our country. And having a Maverick like Palin at his side is such a bonus.
how many McCain points did you earn today?
“BTW ‘knocked up’ is not a nice way to talk.”
Civility is great, but I hope this doesn’t become a PC site when folks are speaking passionately and, in doing so, using everyday language.
Haven’t seen it yet, but I believe “Knocked Up” was the title of a film that by most accounts is hilarious.
@Carlton: If you were reviewing those threads you must’ve come across that as well, and decided that I didn’t deserve any benefit of the doubt regardless.
Furthermore, taking language that would be unremarkable if referring to a male and claiming that it’s sexist when used on a female is sexist.
I said the REMARK is sexist, not that YOU are sexist. I don’t think you are sexist, I don’t say that the people who made the claims are sexist. *I* sometimes make sexist remarks ’cause I aint perfect either. Doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t call me on it if I happen to do it.
I disagree with “Furthermore, taking language that would be unremarkable if referring to a male and claiming that it’s sexist when used on a female is sexist.”. Context matters. If I compare Bush with a chimp that means he is dumb and I was slightly childish. If I compare Obama with a chimp that has a completely different dimension, and that has nothing to do with lowering the bar.
I have no idea what Turbulence said, I ignore him (as I said and explained earlier).
The rest seem like an attempt to pad out the list and justify her (IMO baseless) feeling that Democrats and Obama have been anti-woman.
I don’t think this is the appropriate thread to talk about Obama/Biden. But I didn’t say they were anti-woman, I said they were not great for women. Which (to answer Gary) doesn’t mean that Biden didn’t do a good thing in the anti-violence thing. (sorry, time for an early night here, I lack sleep so I am too tired to look everything up).
@Sebastian: have a great holiday.
And, yes, the morning of 9-11 might have been the most extreme situtation I could think of, but realizing working mothers — my wife is one — have enough on their plate, I do wonder how challenging it would be to be the President of the United States while the nation was under attack and taking care of the needs of a 5-month-old baby. (There was no sarcasm or snark intended there.)
Without wanting to invade your privacy I am curious now wether you work too.
Sorry, it’s bedtime for me. I try to follow the thread, but skip the comments of newcomers. I’ll try TIO tomorrow, if I can find a free moment.
dutchmarbel,
Thanks for clarifying that you don’t read my comments. In the future, I’ll try not to address you in my comments since you won’t read them anyway. If you don’t care enough about your analysis to read my critiques of it, then you’ll forgive me for assuming that your analysis is worthless.
I said the REMARK is sexist, not that YOU are sexist. I don’t think you are sexist, I don’t say that the people who made the claims are sexist.
If someone who isn’t sexist makes a remark that can easily be interpreted in a non-sexist way, I think it’s genuinely rude to pretend that it is sexist for the purposes of compiling your list. Likewise, using obvious sarcasm, etc.
If I compare Obama with a chimp that has a completely different dimension, and that has nothing to do with lowering the bar.
Good point, and completely relevant to the current comments about how she cannot hope to govern with small children in her household.
But that doesn’t allow us to distinguish between sexist criticism of a woman and non-sexist criticism of a woman. For example, many GOPers are now claiming that questioning Palin’s experience is sexist.
And that is what I mean about hyperactivity over criticism actually turning into sexism. If we aren’t allowed to discuss her experience in the same manner that we’d discuss a man’s experience, then it’s a bad double-standard for women, implying that they are too delicate for criticism.
In the end, virtually any criticism could be deflected in this manner (and I expect this will be the case). If Hillary is described as conciliatory, then could be sexist emphasis of her feminine side. If she’s described as a brawler, that could be sexist emphasis on her failure to meet societal feminine expectations.
In the end, these sorts of things have to be weighed in with the context and the speaker. Chopping bits and pieces off and interpreting them in the most negative light is sure to produce evidence of sexism, but why bother?
“If someone who isn’t sexist”
I don’t believe there is such a person, any more than there is a person who is utterly and perfectly non-racist, or utterly and perfectly non-bigoted in any way.
We all have bits of sexist and racist and bigoted thinking inside us that pops out sometimes. Sometimes we notice it, and sometimes we don’t. We live in a culture that has deeply sexist, racist, bigoted threads running through it. We can’t help but be influenced by that in many ways.
The only differences are those of degree, and how self-aware we are.
But that’s why it makes sense to focus on sexist/racist/bigoted statements and behavior, rather than labeling people in a binary way. We all can do better, and none of us is perfect.
dutchmarbel,
Yes, I work, 50-60 hours a week. My wife just added an extra day — being commission-based, this economy is really hurting me — so that puts her at 30 hours a week.
We only have one child, a 9-year-old I’ve probably talked about too much here, and between school work, karate and whatever else comes up, I can’t imagine a big household like the Palin’s. I didn’t marry until age 40 and, at 45, while I would like another child, it just isn’t going to happen — if only because of finances.
I commend folks who handle more than we do and, yes, marvel at the fact that we could have a mother of five — noting that one of them is an infant — a heartbeat away from the presidency.
—
I find the sexism charges fascinating and bothersome — yet fair game — if only because what is and what isn’t seems so arbitrary.
I mean, when I observed to my wife last night how great Cindy McCain looks, is that being sexist? (She agreed, by the way.)
Also, who is being sexist when I have heard both male and female pundits say Joe Biden had better be careful in the VP debates because “you can’t be too hard on a woman” — which, if Biden were, we all know he’d be the next day’s story?
And I guess one last thing: Not saying it’s right but Palin hasn’t seen anything yet if you compare the past six days to what Hillary Clinton has faced the past two decades, going back to her Tammy Wynette remark.
A candidate’s children should be off-limits although the history of political parties and their political action committees suggest otherwise. Nothing, it seems, is truly off-limits today. Nevertheless, the positions of the politicians, including their positions on pre-marital sex, truthfulness regarding their own conduct, and their views on all sorts of national and international issues and actions are very much in play. The actions Mrs. Palin has taken or not taken to properly educate her children on sex-related matters would bear directly on how morally responsible she is. Parents have a moral responsibility to teach their children. Her support or opposition for sex education in public schools would be another indicator. The anecdotal evidence suggests that she is not morally responsible in these matters. Regarding her latest child, is it really her child or her grandchild? She seems to have hidden her last pregnancy far longer than nature would normally allow and I for one don’t believe that it is her child but rather her grandchild. She is 44 after all. If I am correct, this supports the conclusion that perhaps she is not as different from all other politicians as she purports to be.
I have come to like Sarah Palin more since her daughter’s pregnancy has come out. It just proves that S.P. is a real person with real problems. Alot of the candidates that run for office have these well behaved, robotic children (ex.Chelsea Clinton, which never misbehaved and Barack Obama,whos girls look almost like robots in public…I have never seen children 7 and 10 that are that well behaved). Well I have 4 children and let me say that mine are not that well behaved. I would rather have someone in office that I can relate to. I would rather have someone that I can can look at as a role model and say that they handle situations in their family life just like any regular person would. I dont feel that Bristol’s decision is a reflection of S.P. as a mother. Children tend to make their own decisions in life. You just have to try to teach them right from wrong and pray that they take something you’ve taught them and use it. Apparently, Bristol did take something her parents taught her. She made a very grown up decision to keep the baby and get married. She made the decision to take responsibility for her actions and I commend her for that. But this is just my opinion on the matter.
So basically, you’re saying that people shouldn’t talk about Sarah Palin’s private life… by talking about her private life?
Also, there are some key issues with Bristol’s pregnancy that are relevant. Here’s the big one. Sarah Palin said in a press release, “We’re proud of Bristol’s **decision** to have her baby” Yet Sarah’s stance is to outlaw abortion even in the case of rape. So Sarah wants to deprive other families the ability to make the decision her daughter had the right to make.
That is an important policy point/hypocrisy that should be brought up.
No, it isn’t. They’re stealing the word “choice.” The choice is between getting married or giving the baby up for adoption, not between abortion or bringing it to term.
Not that there was a choice there, either. A VP’s grandchild. Given up for adoption. No way will confidentiality be kept. No way that kid isn’t the target of kidnappers, terrorists or extortionists.
I think it’s stupid that the fact her 17-year-old daughter got pregnant is such a big deal..that happens pretty often and if she was anyone else’s kid nobody would say anything.
I think Sarah palin did the right thing in saying she was supporting her daughter and hoped the media would respect her privacy. That should be the end of all the pointless talk.
Mrs. Palin says she is proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby??? So she had a choice? Why would she then take away MY daughter’s choice? Or the choice of rape and incest victims?
What about the concept of having a family and marriage that serves as a model of good behavior, not bad behavior. If we are going to save ourselves we need positive role models for our children.
Senator Obamas children do not watch television, like our Christian family. My disabled 15 year son is also well behaved and well adjusted. Not a miracle just reality.
Palin has no idea how much her children are crying for attention, like her pregnant daughter who has many boyfriends…wait untill her disabled child gets to be two or three…her marriage will be on the block like 90% of marriages with disabled children. It is typically the Mother who advocates for the disabled child.
So,let me get this straight: Sarah Palin is a staunch Republican and supporter of John McCain’s policies. So does that mean that since “MCSAME” believes in 75% pay for women who do the same job as men that she will agree to take a cut in the Vice-President’s salary if she is elected?
I have been watching and reading all the info presented to the public on Gov. Palin and my only conclusion is that this “TWIT” needs to go home and stop embarrasing the rest of the hard working women and mom’s of this great nation!
I believe that Palin placed her already distressed child in a fishbowl. (Threw her to the wolves is more accurate) Yes, I question her judgement as a parent, (not as a mother- a PARENT!)Therefore, it concerns me that if she does not have the best interests of her own family as a priority (as demonstrated repeatedly-traveling late in pregnancy, risking such a long flight WHILE IN LABOR, failing to prepare her children before the birth of a sibling with Down Syndrome, returning to work just days after this child’s birth) why would she do better making decisions related to my family? Her naivete about or disregard for the immediate and very significant needs of her children is evidence enough her faulty and self-centered judgement. I don’t want her involved in decisions affecting my family or students. Is she really someone who will restore the world’s respect for our great country?????