(Yes, I realize I'm a little late on this; redesigning my website has caused a bit of a backlog)

As someone who has long been vocally opposed to right-wing religious fundamentalism, I had to laugh when the Bristol Palin pregnancy story caused thousands of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians to suddenly come out in favor of pre-marital teenage pregnancy, with the most-often sounded refrains being:

"It's really not that big of a deal"

and

"We should leave Sarah Palin's family out of the political debate!"

First, I'd like to deal with the second assertion - that Palin's family is 'off-limits.'  

I can understand not wanting to drag a candidate's family, especially their children, into the nasty, tumultuous world of presidential politics.  But there are several bits of hypocrisy here that I really feel need to be addressed.

• Bristol Palin was not being attacked; her mother's politics were.   Never once have I seen any commentator deriding Bristol Palin for getting pregnant at 17.  However, her pregnancy does spark a set of legitimate questions that we should be asking about our Vice-Presidential candidate.  Sarah Palin has come out vehemently against abortion and comprehensive sex education, maintaining that abstinence education is the only thing we should be teaching our young people about sexuality.  "I am opposed to explicit sex education," she wrote in one gubernatorial survey prior to her election in Alaska. 
  
  And it's fine for her to be opposed to teaching birth control, disease prevention, and alternative activity...as a parent.  However, as Vice-President, she's made it quite clear that she will continue to oppose comprehensive sex education as a matter of public policy - and she will have, to some degree, the power to support that position.  Thus, it becomes a matter of examining the issue of sex education and what real results the Palin position has in the prevention of teen pregnancy.  The uncomfortable truth is, the Palin position - applied by her, as a mother, within her own family - failed to prevent teen pregnancy.  What is even more uncomfortable - and more unspoken - is that Bristol Palin didn't just risk pregnancy; she also risked contracting a host of secually transmitted diseases, including HIV, by having unprotected sex.  If Bristol Palin was announcing that she had AIDS rather than an impending bundle of joy, I have to wonder if the religious right would be so quick to give their blessing?  Or would it have turned in to another opportunity to blame homosexuals, or someone else besides Bristol Palin, for her situation?
  
  Ignorance has never been a solution, and the Palin Sex Education Doctrine is one that insists on enforced ignorance.  Her position is that teaching kids about birth control, disease prevention, oral sex, mutual masturbation, and other ways for people to enjoy sexual contact without risking pregnancy while lowering the risk of transmitting or contracting a disease will just encourage them to go have sex because they feel 'safe.'  This is not logical, nor is it effective, and the evidence of that is due to start breathing in about 3 months.  That is the conversation that the conservative religous right doesn't want to have, and that is the real reason why they are so opposed to any mention of Bristol Palin's pregnancy.
  
• The families of politicians have NEVER been 'off limits.' - Remember Amy Carter?  Or Chelsea Clinton? Or Susan Ford?  What about Luci Johnson?  Amy Carter was the butt of jokes for four awkward, coltish, flat-chested teenage years, subject to so much media harassment that she refuses to give interviews to this day.  Luci Johnson was harassed about her grades...and then accused of being a publicity hound when she brought them up and the media were told about it.  Chelsea Clinton...my lord, John McCain himself attacked Chelsea, once saying publicly that he thought Chelsea's father was Janet Reno.  Alice Roosevelt, daughter of Teddy, once referred to herself as an 'ambulatory Washington Monument.'  Chelsea Clinton was so hurty by a Wayne's World skit on Saturday Night Live that Mike Myers ended up callng to apologize and the skit has been permanently excised from all archive footage.  The sons and daughters of Al Gore and George W. Bush have also done their time in the tabloids.  The notion that there's some long-standing barrier between the children of politicians and the media, pundits, and the just plain boorish is utterly fantastical.  That said...if I was Obama, I'd have jumped on that bandwagon too...because it'll be his kids next if he doesn't (and it probably will anyway).
• A politician's family is perfectly all right to use...for political gain - When was the last time a presidential candidate with children didn't have them on the podium at the end of a convention speech?  Sarah Palin has listed motherhood as one of her qualifications to be Vice-President (or, as is unfortunately likely in a McCain-Palin presidency, President).  If you're going to use 'motherhood' as a job reference, then it naturally follows that We The People have the right to check your references.  The fact that Bristol Palin is pregnant at 17 years old is a scathing indictment of the efficacy of Palin's parenting, which encompasses her religious views and her positions on social issues like abortion and sex education, and those are relevant subjects to her candidacy.  To irrationally insist that we not be allowed to consider how her children are doing when she touts motherhood as a job qualification is like trying a man for murder and refusing to allow evidence that he was hundreds of miles away from the scene of the crime when it took place.

Given the above, it's quite clear that there is no reasonable, fair, rational excuse that Bristol Palin's pregnancy should be die verboten Thema.

More troublesome than this strange sequestering, however, is the sudden love that the religious right has for teenage pregnancy. Suddenly it's "no big deal" that a seventeen year old girl is pregnant - nevermind that we're overlooking the "sin" of "adultery."  Funny that the religious right would be so forgiving of a teenage girl for that, but not a middle-aged man, but then double-standards are nothing new to this crowd.

Teenage pregnancy is a big deal...and I know whereof I speak.  I love my daughter - now 19, I'm 38 at this writing - but having a child at 18 years old was not only a stupid move on my part that worked against my own interests, it also didn't do her mother any favors, and most importantly it didn't do my daughter any favors.  There's a rash of statistics and numbers I could throw at you - sons of teen moms are 13% more likely to end up in prison; daughters of teen moms are 22% more likely to be teen moms themselves; nearly 80% of teen moms end up on welfare; only one-third graduate high school - but those don't really mean anything in the real world.  In the real world, I'm forever tied to someone I have a lot of resentment toward; I spent a lot of years pursuing bad relationships in a desperate attempt to 'find a step-mom'; my daughter has gone through feelings of insecurity, fear, separation anxiety, being marked as 'different' from her peers, and all of the other emotional baggage that goes along with custody fights, child-support fights, and so forth.  Mistakes that I made earlier in my life and could have corrected became insurmountable obstacles - no time to fix things like that when you've got a child to raise, feed, and clothe.  Teenagers are more prone to anger-management issues, impetuous and irresponsible behavior, and a host of other things that just makes them Not Good Parents.  It's ludicrous that here we have people endorsing the ability of a 17 year old to handle a child when the law has determined that she isn't even mature enough to handle a few drinks for another four years.

I want to note emphatically here that I don't blame or resent my daughter even a tiny little bit for the consequences in my life of her birth - that was my decision to make, and I made it.  I had unprotected sex, and I agreed to forego adoption.  The responsibility is 100% mine.  If there's any resentment in my heart over the issue, it's targeted at myself for burdening her from the first moment of her existence with a life situation that put her at a disadvantage versus children born to stable, mature parents.  Given the 'career' path I was on and my lifestyle at that time in my life, I might well be dead now if it weren't for my daughter...but I sure didn't do her any favors in creating her when I did.

I find it to be an outrageous and dangerous hypocricy that worries about what our kids are taking away from knowing that it's possible to have sex without getting pregnant or catching a disease...but we cheerfully endorse teen pregnancy as 'no big deal' without wondering in the least what lessons they're taking away from that. Furthermore, while Bristol Palin is fortunate enough to have a solid family support system in place that will help her continue to grow and (hopefully) work toward a completed education and successful career, the vast majority of pregnant teenagers don't have that option.  In America today, for most of us the idea of even beinga ble to support five children is almost comical.  For her sake and for her child's, I'm glad that Bristol Palin enjoys a level of financial security and family support that will make this difficult situation less difficult, but what the 'yay pregnant kids' crowd overlooks - as they so often do - is that the Palin situation is an exception to the norm.  Most pregnant teenagers don't have a rich family that can afford to support a grandchild while mom finishes growing up.  Many of them have no family at all, to speak of - indeed, one of the reasons cited by many teenage mothers for having their kids rather than going for adoption or abortion is that they are trying to gain that 'unconditional love,' a sense of emotional security and validation and personal purpose and self-worth.  While my heart just breaks for any human being who is lacking those things...man, that sure is a lot to put on a newborn baby.

But I digress, the points are:

• Teenage pregnancy is a 'big deal,' and a bad thing.
• Bristol Palin's pregnancy is a direct reflection of the lack of comprehensive sex education that her mother would, in her capacity as vice-president and potential capacity as president, work to ensure all of our children are afflicted with
• The fact that conservative christians are actually endorsing and condoning this pregnancy is an act of hypocricy unmatched in modern times
• The suggestion that we, the people, have no right to examine the results of Sarah Palin's parenting "skills" when she herself has invoked those skills as a qualification for the second-highest office in the country is patently ridiculous
• The notion that the families of politicians are 'off limits' may be noble, but it certainly is a dramatic reversal of previous situations...and let's be honest here, some of the nastiest remarks made about Chelsea Clinton came directly from the same people who are crying foul now.  Can you imagine the vitriol that would have spewed forth if Chelsea had become pregnant at 17?!

As is so often the case in politics, we're being misdirected so that our potential leaders can conveniently avoid addressing some very tough issues.  No, I'm not advocating that the press have a field day with Bristol Palin.  In fact I kind of like the idea that we should stop using the children of politicians as fodder for tabloid articles and stand-up comedy.  However, I would take the exactly opposite approach to this situation than that which has transpired; those kids who really don't do anything out of the ordinary - a little partying, a little dating, a little fun here and there - should be left alone, and the kids themselves should never be directly targeted or criticized by the press or anyone else.  It's just not cool.

But when we're talking about a child experiencing the negative impact of her parents' approach to life, when that approach is clearly a major 'selling point' of that candidate's judgment and qualifications for the job they seek, then we do have every right, and every obligation, to examine the situation closely and draw whatever conclusions may be drawn - in this case, that abstinence-only sex education simply does not work, and the evidence is walking around Sarah Palin's living room right this minute.  The fact that she has never once considered that maybe her parental 'guidance' led to this situation, that maybe her outlook on things is a bit off-kilter or ineffective, is very telling.  I'm frankly very afraid of anyone who is so convinced that their way is the right way, that they are so infallible, that even in the face of contrary evidence they are unable to question their own judgement.   That smells very much like our current leadership...and there are very, very few reasonable people who would argue that our current leadership has been a good thing for this country.

Leave Bristol Palin alone, sure...but while you're respecting the kid's right to privacy, let's not forego our obligation to carefully examine the positions of the candidate, and to take a hard look at what results those positions have given birth to (no pun intended...well, maybe a little) in the candidate's own life.