Are you confused yet?
You have to feel sorry for Bristol Palin. Because of her mother’s place on the Republican ticket, the biggest challenges of Bristol’s life thus far – becoming a parent and a wife before she has even graduated high school – will now play out on the national stage, opening her up to the judgments of hundreds of millions of gossipy Americans, not to mention election-watchers across the globe.
In conservative circles, the pregnancy news is more than just fine – politically, it is playing like a dream among Republican delegates in St. Paul. The idea that the Christian right would have judged Sarah Palin a failure in imparting proper values to her sexually active daughter is silly, a typical liberal misreading of contemporary conservative ideology. Though the religious right promotes abstinence-only sex education, vows of chastity, and dances at which prepubescent girls pledge their virginity to dad, conservatives do live in 21st-century America, just like the rest of us. They know teen sex happens. They just also happen to believe, against all common sense, that it can be eradicated.
The truth is, conservatives are more familiar with teen parenthood than are secular liberals. On the whole, red states have higher teen pregnancy and birth rates than blue states. In Texas, the state with the highest teen birth rate, 63 out of every 1,000 young women aged 15 to 19 has had a baby. California has the lowest teen birth rate; only 39 of every 1,000 15- to 19-year-old girls there have carried a pregnancy to term. Alaska, where Bristol Palin grew up, has a typical teen birth rate of about 42. </em>
Do the GOP believe in anything rooted in reality? Apparently not. And there’s more here:
