Hey, Palin: Is My Family Off Limits, Too?

The recent revelation that Sarah Palin's daughter will be a mother makes public the fact that the Palin family has an issue - not a problem. Only their family can say whether the pregnancy is a "problem." As everyone from McCain-camp messengers to Barack Obama has reminded us, it's none of our business, and it should be off limits. The big chink in that argument is that Sarah Palin and her promoters are the ones who claimed her supposedly sterling credentials as a parent and a champion's stance on "family values" made her that much more worthy of the nation's second-highest office. If you attack someone with a bat, you don't really have anywhere to stand when you scream, "no fair using bats!" But let's agree that her family's business is her family's business and no one else's. So the question for Palin becomes, why doesn't that apply to our families too?

If Palin becomes vice president, she will have one of the world's widest avenues for lobbying in favor of her beliefs, leanings and opinions. Thanks to Vice President Cheney, many of us suspect she could have a lot more influence than that. And if the Straight Talk Express, God forbid, drove off into the sunset, well, we've seen what can happen when a president thinks his beliefs are the only ones that matter. Palin's self-stated beliefs include the ideas that creationism should be taught in schools and that gays and lesbians cannot form real families. And central to her belief system is the tenet that no woman or girl should have a choice about what to do with her own body from the very second of conception, even in cases of rape or incest.

Ignoring - okay, not at all ignoring - the stunning hypocrisy in Palin proudly declaring that her daughter had MADE THE CHOICE to have her baby, or in the governor's marketing jackpot of an OK Magazine cover that drips: "A Mother's Painful Choice" (to bring her own Down Syndrome baby to term), each of the Palin beliefs listed above involves very personal, family's-business-only issues. Whether or not any child of mine is taught creationism or any other piece of religious doctrine is my family's business, and our business alone. The gay couple down the street feel and operate as a family, and that is no business of any of the rest of us. Whether or not I have a pregnant daughter or my wife is with child, and what we as a family choose to do about it is as much a private, family-only matter for us as the same issues are for the Palins and every other American.

So let me get this straight, Palin: no individual, and certainly no member of the press, should comment on, wonder aloud about - perhaps even ponder privately - issues in your family that you yourself have made into campaign talking points. Fine. But if America elects you, you would like to make all the decisions about any of those issues for the rest of us? Hands off your family, but our families will be covered with your philosophical and religious fingerprints? I refuse to sign up for that.