The news that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnson have split up has been confirmed for a few days now, and so far, I haven't heard any conservative outrage directed at this very public unwed mother who chose to bring a child into the world without benefit of heterosexual marriage. Perhaps the response has been muted because Palin is the child of someone who ran for office and never asked to be in the spotlight herself, and the decent way to treat the family of public officials is to withhold comment on their private lives. Maybe, but I'm skeptical. The worldview of the far right tends not to run along the lines of "live and let live."
No, more likely it's because to the base of her mother's party, it's not that important whether she gets married or not. To the far right, the error she made was not that she had unprotected sex, but that she was unmarried and had sex at all. To them, she did the right thing: She suffered the consequences of her carnal desires by having a baby ten years, by her own admission, before it would have been optimal to have kids. There's been no outcry because she played by the rules, or at least their rules.
This is hard for observers on the left, who have long labored to find middle ground with adamant pro-lifers, to understand. Progressives look at a teenage girl who gets knocked up by her teenage boyfriend and think, "This is sad, as well as further proof that, as the girl admitted herself, abstinence alone isn't realistic." They might even point out, as the Chicago Tribune did in a recent piece, that the decision to have a baby in such cases is likely to lead to considerable challenges to both mother and child, since less than eight percent of teen girls marry the baby's father within a year of its birth. And when they do, the marriage has half the chance of succeeding that it would if the girl were at least 25. To people who focus on the quality of an individual's life, it makes sense to focus on prevention.
But to right-wing ideologues, the debate begins and ends with the sinful act of sex outside of marriage, which can lead to only one outcome: punishment. Why else would it be so difficult to reach consensus about the failure of abstinence education, and the vital necessity of spreading information about birth control? A facile argument that many pro-lifers have used in the past is that if you tell teens how to stay safe during sex, you're encouraging them to have it. This, despite numerous reports, including a recent one in the Journal of Adolescent Health, showing that teens who receive sex education are far more likely to delay intercourse until after they turn 15. And countless studies make clear that abstinence-only education doesn't decrease the likelihood that teens will have sex before marriage, and that when they do, they're more likely to become pregnant or infected with an STD.
Why else would conservatives such as Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio State Secretary and current senior fellow at the Family Research Council, adamantly refuse to concede on MSNBC's "Hardball" the other day that practicing birth control is a good way to prevent abortions? His response to the suggestion that conservatives and progressives can at least find commonality on this point was that "We want to teach people, culturally, that what differentiates us from a lot of other species is the human will. So, we tell young people, look, we don't think you can control yourself. Therefore, use a contraceptive. How is that enforcing the human will?" In other words, the whole concept of prevention is irrelevant. You play, you pay.
Certainly, not everyone who wants to "protect unborn life" feels this way. Some leaders -- most notably evangelical pastor Jim Wallis -- have publicly talked about the link between birth control and avoiding unwanted pregnancies. I have to assume that they care more about reducing abortions than they do about reducing the number of unmarried people who have sex.
In any event, it's important for progressives to keep their eyes and minds open when they argue with their ideological opponents. If pro-lifers won't even consider the option of educating kids on how to avoid pregnancy, it's possible that they're just paying lip service to wanting to stop "the life of an innocent baby [from] being taken," in Blackwell's words. More likely, what they really want is to return to the lily-white, less-complicated "Leave it to Beaver" world they feel our culture left behind -- a world that, just like the promise of a long, happy future for the Palin-Johnson family, never really existed in the first place.
We need to teach our young men and women to love themselves; to have self-respect; to know about sex and love; and who have goals for the future. A young girl with goals and self-esteem is unlikely to engage in "stupid" sex.
Bottom line? Teach sex ed - take the "guilt" away from sex - and let our young people know that they have a wonderful future that they don't want to screw up by having unprotected/premature sex.
That's all there is to it.
I think there are a lot of bitter, angry people out there trapped in shotgun or impulsive uninformed marriages, plus the children of those marriages, who blame sex for all their problems -- partly because their church says that's the big sin. If they have to suffer, then others should too. Serves them right, they say to themselves.
Interestingly, other cultures/religions consider greed to be a much bigger sin and/or sickness and irresponsible sex to be, well, irresponsible. Greed -- the thing that makes one person hoard so much more than they can use while others go without -- can be so much more destructive to a person, family and community than a little nookie.
"I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend."
Thomas Jefferson
That argument in itself also implies that it's the sex that matters, in that if the sex wasn't consensual, then the pregnant woman is somehow more 'innocent'and therefore deserving of the right to abortion. By extension then, the rest of us, who chose to have sex, are less 'innocent' and deserving of the right to choose about our pregnancies. I really wish that campaigners would stop using that line of argument, because it obscures first principles. Either abortion is right or wrong, either women have a right to it or they don't.
I for one am happy to make the argument that we have an absolute right to abortions no matter WHAT the circumstances under which we got pregnant, and don't feel the need to use 'hard cases' or anti-sex sentimentality to make my case...
Yours is a very reasoned and logical position. Which is why it isn't very useful in this highly freighted debate.
I also find it ironic that they think talking about safe sex encourages sex. Does talking about not doing drugs encourage drug use? Every parent who tells their child not to do drugs, do they all have children addicted to heroin? Telling people not to steal, does that result in a bunch of thieves? Their argument has no basis.
I think it's not a fair comparison, really: that is to say, virtually all of us need "sex" in our lives in some form, from pubetry onwards; whereas, those who need "drugs," as in, those who become dependent on getting high on something just to get through the day, that's only something like half of us.
I've long argued that you can't be opposed to abortion *and* against birth control & sex education. What these people are truly opposed to is any sex that doesn't take place between a married heterosexual couple. And I suspect they're barely comfortable with even that! They use the "unborn" as a cover, but what they really want to force us all to conform to their belief system - particularly as it relates to sexuality.
In fact, abstinence is so important to them that they'd rather see people suffer due to unintended pregnancies and STDs than promote safe sex. They can use those people as examples.
They are sexually repressed and therefore sexually obsessed. If you take "abortion" and homosexuality off their agenda, what's left? They're a sick bunch, really.
But then the Church(my religion) is deeply involved in politics, in America, Latin America and throughout the world. And that is despite the fact that Jesus warned us to NOT merge church and state, when He said: render unto caesar... That is but one of the Churchs hypocrisies.
It's endless hate for everyone who is not Catholic is another and an abomination unto God and his creation, the entire worldwide Family of Man.
The Churchs Theologies have gotten ever further from Jesus central message of peace, love and tolerance, and: do unto others as you would have them...
Judgment is mine sayeth the Lord... But the Church never stops judging everyone else. When the Pope removes the mote/beam from his eye the Church and the Family of Man will be a better place because we and the Church can be about the business of making the world and the Family of Man something that Jesus will want to return to. Until then we are doomed to wander in the desert, alone and forlorn, destitute, unfulfilled, EMPTY and ever seeking. And that is the ultimate tragedy.
We the little people are nearly powerless, the Church is extremely powerful. And yet it does not see. All of that power could be spent on healing, and yet, it is spent on hating.
Ohh Welll.
It simply isn't about what actions are "right or wrong", it's completely about what people are "good or evil". In the conservative christion world-view, everything that is good is personally done by God, and everything that is bad is personally done by Satan. A good person can only do good, and an evil person can only do evil.
If you point out something "wrong" which was done by one of the "good" persons, then a right wing ideologue has no problem with just retorting with "So?". It simply bounces off the skull without any threat of penetrating.
Taking a line out of context from the bible proves little.