Let's talk seriously about Bristol Palin.

Great Debates
1

Here’s the problem I have with this whole mess.

The Ford family had to stage an intervention with Betty Ford in the seventies, and her recovery wasn’t complete until the early 1980s. It seems to me, recalling this, that the press was pretty friendly to Mrs. Ford throughout, as they should have been.

I also don’t recall that much of a feeding frenzy after it was revealed that Kitty Dukakis had a drinking problem so severe that she drank rubbing alcohol, and she has gone on to do some good work in addiction medicine herself.

Likewise, when George McGovern’s daughter Terry died after being an alcoholic for thirty years, I think a lot of people were surprised by the news - they had never heard much of her problems before that.

When Al Gore’s son got into several situations involving reckless driving and drugs, I don’t recall much suggestion that the Gores were unfit parents, and when Howard Dean had to leave the campaign trail for a few days in 2003 because his son participated in the theft of liquor from a country club, the press and his political opponents let him deal with that. I don’t think many people even remember that incident today.

But, somehow, the fact that Bristol Palin is pregnant is worthy of massive amounts of newspaper ink and internet speculation.

I think there is a lot of blame to go around here, frankly - the campaign flubbed the announcement of this fact. But that doesn’t account for the fact that this has some people completely unhinged where that really isn’t warranted.

Now, I’m not an idiot - I do realize that politicians want to project a certain family image and so manage their spouses and kids in certain ways. People expect this - and it goes with the territory.

But if a seventeen-year-old girl is singled out for especially harsh treatment given this kind of history, people might notice, and wonder why. After all, Bristol committed no crime here. She’s just pregnant. That’s not huge news. And if we can stipulate that a kid’s reckless driving or boosting liquor doesn’t indict someone as a bad parent - and I think we have to do so - then we should add a child’s unplanned pregnancy to that.

And if this hyperactivity continues, people are certainly free to wonder about the motives behind such. The politics of personal destruction is a convenient catch phrase, but like all catch phrases, it captures a real phenomenon.

2

I’ve seen a lot of complaints from the right about this “harsh treatment”, but have yet to see any myself that is directed toward Bristol Palin.

3

I am prepared to be shocked by the brutal treatment this poor girl has recieved. But, in your haste, you have neglected to provide any examples.

4

I do not care about Bristol. My guess is she had unprotected sex.
The problem is the repubs insist they have a better way for the unwashed citizens. Their silly idea of abstinence . Every parent wishes their kids would wait until they were established in life to raise kids. But, even the superior ,close to god folk, raise kids with raging hormones. A little sex education and contraception goes a long way toward keeping a kids life more simple.
The repubs are preaching from their lofty spots, sitting at the right hand of god. Explaining how to raise your children. Perhaps they do not have a better idea.

5

I’m with the others, other than her pregnancy being mentioned on the news, what “harsh treatment” has she received?

6

I haven’t seen any harsh treatment toward Bristol Palin or the father of her child either.

I have seen a whole lot of undeserved verbal fire directed at the liberal media by the GOPers, purportedly in defense of Bristol Palin but actually intended to distract the media from their justified ongoing and thorough investigation of Sarah Palin.

It seems to me that a politician who puts her family front and center in the original photo op has no legitimate complaint when that family is put under the microscope.

7

Come now, you know exactly why.

The GOP, and it seems, none more so than Palin, advocate ‘family’ in the strictest, most traditional sense of the word. Then, a matter of hours after the nomination, it appears that the new VP’s family doesn’t quite match the mould to which GOP pin their flag.

Even from here, I think that’s worthy of comment - albeit not to the point of personal attacks. Mind you, I don’t think I’ve seen personal attacks by the MSM, but my definition obviously varies from certain others around here.

8

A) We have a media culture that is obsessed with baby bumps and pregnancies.

B) Palin (and her party) think that the best way to prevent teen pregnancy is to tell teens not to have sex. This is an approach that annoys the fuck out of democrats, so it’s a Nelson Muntz sort of ha-ha moment.

C) I haven’t seen anything attacking Bristol. Have you?

9

This absolutely should be a non-issue and Barack Obama said it best:

Obama made it very clear. IMO - There are many reasons why Palin isn’t qualified to lead the free world, but the pregnancy of her daughter is not one of them. Besides, Bristol and Levi will be getting married, apparently of their own free will, so that puts to rest the notion that it was going to be forced by Sarah. I think people need to move on to the issues and focus less on this National Enquirer stuff.

10

Some of the talk about Bristol’s pregnancy is due to her mother’s support of abstinence only sex education. Do you not see the irony in that? I see abstinence only education as analogous to a parent removing the air bags from their child’s car because that will make them a more cautious driver. If someone who did that had a child injured in an automobile accident it would be bad for the child, but I’d still consider it ironic enough to comment on, although I haven’t commented on Bristol’s pregnancy, mainly because it’s not that interesting to me. Ho hum, a knocked-up teen, big deal.

Most of the talk I’ve seen lately has been people complaining about all the talk. Yes, it’s nobody’s business but the families, and if people would stop saying that 24 hours a day I could go back to not caring about it.

If you have an example of some of the harsh treatment directed at Bristol I’d like to see it. I don’t consider simply reporting that she’s pregnant to be abusive.

11

This is sadly representative.

Note that it is on the website of New York magazine - which for all of its strangeness sometimes is still something of an institution.

12

The rules of the game have changed. It used to be that the mass media (newspapers, radio, TV) were the gatekeepers, and they could keep things locked up behind the gates. Going back a lot further, no one knew that a president of the US had had polio, crippling his legs, so that he could not walk without someone holding him up. The reporters of the day kept that a secret for 13 years of his presidency.

It’s inconceivable that that could have happened with a more open media, but over the last few years the media has opened up even further, so that anyone with Internet access can run a political blog. There are no longer any secrets, unless you keep them hidden from even your closest friends.

But I’m not sure it matters that much. A person confined to a wheel-chair could get elected as president today, because most people would think it irrelevant to being president, and I suspect that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is irrelevant, except as an illustration of, to one side, the virtues of no aborting an unwanted child, and to the other side, the evils of abstinence-based sex education. No one’s vote will change because she had unprotected sex and lost the gamble.

13

Not really. I don’t know what her daughter was taught at home or in church - where conservatives feel sex education belongs at least in part.

Besides, I’m pretty certain Al Gore taught his son not to drive fast or take drugs, and Howard Dean taught his son not to boost booze from a country club. This isn’t a reflection on them. Why should this be a reflection of Sarah Palin?

14

Sarah Palin has taken some heat on this subject, but how much heat has Briston taken? I’ve not seen any-- not even on this decidedly anti-Palin MB.

15

If there aren’t secrets any longer, why do we pretend that students that get abstinence focused sex education still have no idea what condoms are?

16

Her pregnancy doesn’t merit a serious discussion. It’s pure comedy.

17

Piling up, no there has been no harsh treatment of Bristol Palin and no we do not want to talk about her. We want to talk about how decisions made about her by the adults in the room reflect upon them. In so doing she will mentioned but she is not being judged. From my side of the fence she is a teen ager who made a mistake that lots of teen agers make and is dealing with it in accordance with her own values. Lord knows I’m happy that I even survived some of the mistakes I made as a teen ager. I have nothing but empathy for her.

Her mother on the other hand I hold in utmost contempt. In so far as her willingness to use her daughter’s pregnancy explicitly as a political tool - not letting it be known before she was announced as a VP nominee so it would be old news by then - releasing the information only to squash other rumors regarding her mother’s character and judgment - Sarah Palin is despicable.

The Right’s hypocrisy in this matter is also fair game but unsurprising. Is there any real question how the Right would be reacting to a Democratic VP nominee who had a pregnant daughter even if that nominee was not female, but more so if she was? And before you assume that a Pro-Choice candidate’s child would have an abortion, let me remind you that Pro-Choice does not mean Pro-Abortion. No cite handy, but my recollection is that the vast majority of those Pro-Choice also say that they personally would choose another option (and in fact prefer in particular teaching and encouraging effective birth control in addition to encouraging abstinence in the first place as teens will sometimes be teens). How the Right would be portraying a Democratic woman running with this kind of personal saga going on in her family? Be honest and be real.

Yes Bristol Palin is being victimized, but not by the media and not by us. She is being victimized by her mother and the rest of Team McCain, thrown willingly on the tracks to further McCain’s and Palin’s personal ambitions and the cause of the extreme Religious Right who have twisted McCain’s arms farther behind his back than any VC torturer ever did.

18

It’s not that these kids don’t know that contraception doesn’t exist, it’s that parents and church are such strong influences that those at least partly drown out other messages.

You can draw a parallel to Jewish kids who are raised in kosher households. They know full well what bacon is, but because they got the message that it’s bad, they won’t eat it even if given the opportunity to do so.

Robin

19

Exactly right. You can’t look at this one failure and say “Hey, this proves that Sarah Palin’s methods don’t work!” or “Aha! This demonstrates some inadequacy in her parenting skills!”

As I’ve emphasized before, children will always be capable of making their own mistakes. You can teach a child all you want, but ultimately, they are always free to disobey. Heck, one doper candidly admitted that she got pregnant despite copious instruction on so-called “safe sex.” Does this mean that “safe sex” education just plain doesn’t work?

Furthermore, how do you know what Bristol Palin has been taught? We know is that her mother advocates abstinence-only teaching, but we don’t know what Bristol has actually been taught in the schools. If it turns out that her school taught her the merits of safe sex, should we conclude that safe sex education is an abominable failure?

And just to be strictly rigorous, we don’t know when Governor Palin adopted her current views on sex education, which could have been well into Bristol’s teen years. Nor do we know what Todd Palin believes and has taught his children. It is patently unfair to take this one data point and conclude that either Gov Palin or her methods are at fault.

Now, I’m not saying that Sarah Palin’s immaculate teaching methods were horribly corrupted by an evil educational system. Nor am I denouncing Bristol for some horrible misdeed. What I am saying is that it’s unfair to blame Bristol’s mother for her error – ESPECIALLY since we don’t know what Bristol has actually been taught regarding sexuality.

20

What’s funny about it is that if Bristol were a black inner-city teen, the Republicans would point at her as proof that city folk don’t share their god fearing rural sensibilities.

It’s a joke, the Repubs tell us every day how to live our lives, right from the Good Book. They have no problem telling gay people they can’t get married because of “family values”. They have no problem stamping out proper sex education because of “family values”. They want to prevent women from exercising rights over their own body because of “family values”. Yet, when one of their own portrays a definitive lack of said values, they suddenly decide it’s a personal matter.

If it’s so goddamn personal, quit trying to shove your personal views on the topic down everyone else’s throat.