Barack Obama, doing what he had to do politically, clearly got a little angry with reporters and urged them to stay away from stories about the pregnancy of the presumptive Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol.
Families are off-limits, he said. Except when they shove those families in our faces. Palin’s biography was named as a big reason for her pick. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain announced her as a tough-talking, anti-abortion mother of five who was supposed to help get the “hockey moms” into the Republican camp.
But my bigger problem is that Bristol was an unwed teen having sex and her mom is a big supporter, like many Republicans, of abstinence-only education. Opponents of sex education in schools present it as the state saying, “Go ahead, do whatever you want, and here’s a condom!” rather than what it is in truth: an attempt to give kids all information about sex, contraceptives, pregnancy, and STD’s, and typically includes the fact that abstinence is the only 100 percent sure way to avoid pregnancy and diseases.
Abstinence-only education presents kids with a binary, religiously-influenced choice, a choice to wait until marriage or to walk through the gates of Hell. How responsible is it to pretend that things like condoms and birth control doing exist?
Brian Lehrer asked that question on his WNYC show today, and callers responded that they didn’t believe kids don’t know about contraceptives anyway. But trust me, I grew up in a Bible Belt town without sex ed, and those kids did not know. Despite decades of efforts to teach the contrary, they still think you can’t get pregnant your first time. And it was me, not an adult, who talked to my friend about sex when we were 18 and she had just gotten engaged.
It’s not like teenagers weren’t having sex, of course. There was a pregnancy in my school at least once a year, and new mothers ranged in age from 13 to 18. There were girls who pretended not to be pregnant until the first and last scary rush to the hospital. There were girls who were, frankly, trying to get pregnant. There were marriages and there were not. There are a lot of grandparents raising kids.
There were also the secrets. There were the outwardly conservative religious pillars whose daughters were on birth control. There were the football stars having sex with girls on the wrong side of the tracks. There were the girls who went away on “vacation” but were secretly having abortions, or arranging adoptions, or coming back with surprise “baby brothers and sisters.” Those stories faded after my mom’s generation but didn’t entirely disappear. At the most open, there were the hastily-arranged shotgun weddings.
The truth is, it was the town elite, those who were relatively wealthy or thought especially pious, who preached “personal responsibility” but didn’t have to live it. Poor girls were the ones who had to stay in school with their swollen bellies, openly judged. The poor girls whose families couldn’t arrange anything “respectable.” And the poor girls who would be judged if they resorted to abortion or adoption.
And that’s the real double-standard in America, and it always has been. The powerful do what they want no matter what they decry. And that’s why Bristol’s pregnancy is outrageous. Because those who oppose abortion are the first to say that sex before marriage is unambiguously wrong, but are now saying that they support Palin’s support of her daughter. Someone has to call out the hypocrisy in the religious right, because they can’t tout these philosophies and not be held accountable to them.
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