Some Thoughts on Bristol Palin's Pregnancy

This is my only post on this and frankly I think it maybe one too many. That said, it received some publicity today. First, the only folks that think this will affect the campaign in anyway are the left wing blogs.

I don't think the evidence is there to claim Trig is Bristol's son, as some have speculated, but a second rumor floating around Alaska circles turns out to have been true:

The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.

Bristol Palin, one of Alaska Gov. Palin's five children with her husband, Todd, is about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, the Palins said in a statement released by the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

...along with a few members of the MSM

My first reaction was shock. Then anger. John McCain chose a running mate simply because she is a woman and one who appealed to the Republican's conservative evangelical base. Now, with news that Palin's 17-year-old unmarried daughter is pregnant, McCain's pick may not even find support among "family values" voters.

Barack Obama, for his part, showed great class today regarding this story...

I have said before and I will repeat again: People's families are off limits," Obama said. "And people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18 and how a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn’t be a topic of our politics."

As for the allusion from the MSM that social conservatives would be turned off to the Palin campaign as a result, well that was answered by leading social conservatives.

This is the pro-life choice. The fact that people will criticize her for this shows the astounding extent to which the secular critics of the pro-life movement just don’t get it. Those who criticize the Palin family don’t understand that we don’t see babies as a punishment but as a blessing. Barack Obama said that if one of his daughters made a mistake and got pregnant out of wedlock he wouldn’t want her to be punished with a child. Pro lifers don’t see a child as punishment.”

James Dobson echoed those statements.

In the 32-year history of Focus on the Family, we have offered prayer, counseling and resource assistance to tens of thousands of parents and children in the same situation the Palins are now facing. We have always encouraged the parents to love and support their children and always advised the girls to see their pregnancies through, even though there will of course be challenges along the way. That is what the Palins are doing, and they should be commended once again for not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances.

This overwhelmingly positive reaction didn't stop others in the MSM from playing pseudo analyst.

The impact of such a bombshell announcement is hard to gauge so soon after it has been made public. Assessing the way it could influence the race is also complicated by the ongoing wall-to-wall coverage of Hurricane Gustav -- the cable networks have stuck with the coverage of the natural disaster so far, just adding a line in the news crawl about the Palin revelation.

In my opinion, the impact of this "bombshell" is not all that hard to guage. Those that are political opponents of Palin will see this news as affirmation of their stance. Those that support her, like Dobson, will have their views affirmed by her daughter doing the responsible thing and not only keeping the child but marrying the father. Those in the middle will care very little and wonder why we are spending so much oxygen on a topic so unrelated to the campaign. If decisions made by hormonal teenagers have any relevance to our political dynamics, then our country really is in trouble.

What really bothered me about the coverage was stories like this.

By the way, as has been pointed out, Palin backed abstinence-only education during her 2006 gubernatorial race. In an Eagle Forum Alaska questionnaire, Palin gave this response to the following question:

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?Palin: Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.

*** UPDATE *** NBC's Abby Livingston adds that a McCain spokesperson in May 2007 said the Arizona Republican supported abstinence-only education, too. "Sen. McCain believes the correct policy for educating young children on this subject is to promote abstinence as the only safe and responsible alternative. To do otherwise is to send a mixed signal to children that, on the one hand they should not be sexually active, but on the other here is the way to go about it. As any parent knows, ambiguity and equivocation leads to problems when it comes to teaching children right from wrong. Sen. McCain believes that there are many negative forces in today’s society that promote irresponsible and dangerous behavior to our children. The public education system should not join this chorus of moral equivocation and ambiguity.”

Now, I suppose in the demented brain of this MSM writer this event somehow proves that abstinence only programs don't work. It comes from the same demented groupthink that makes the MSM think that such a revelation would be the kiss of death with social conservatives, or that there maybe real impact on the campaign as a result of this. That's the problem with folks in the MSM. They spend so much time with folks exactly like themselves they don't know how anyone else thinks.

As for the idea that this somehow proves that abstinence only doesn't work, that is a total distortion of anecdotal evidence. First, no education program will be one hundred percent effective. Second, no one knows the circumstances by which Bristol got pregnant and so applying abstinence only as the reason is ridiculous. Third, and most importantly, whether or not abstinence only works can only be proven by empirical evidence. One case doesn't say much one way or another. Anyone that pretends as though it does is twisting the reality for ideological gain.

What really bothers me about such talk is this. There is no more gutter trash commentary than when partisans on either side use a tragic shooting as some sort of a blunt to prove that their side of the 2nd amendment argument is correct. Not only is such an argument totally fallacious, specifically because it is anecdotal, but it is totally inappropriate. In this case, the family revealed something totally irrelevant to the campaign because they had to, and now partisans are using this private matter for political gain. That is the sort of political opportunism that I loathe. Now, I hope everyone can move beyond this story and onto things more relevant to the campaign.