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Dave Zweifel's Plain Talk: At least religious right embracing pregnant teens

Dave Zweifel  —  9/05/2008 5:23 am

I went browsing the Web earlier this week after the news broke about vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's pregnant 17-year-old daughter.

Barack Obama was rightfully telling his people to lay off, that kids of the candidates should be off limits and he'd fire any staffer who attempted to make hay from the situation.

Nevertheless, many of the right-wing bloggers were insisting that the Obama backers and the "liberal" media were making it an issue and decrying how sleazy and underhanded that was. Their own vitriolic charges in response weren't making it an issue?

The evangelical right was going to do the "Christian thing" and forgive Bristol Palin for her pregnancy out of wedlock. After all, she is making the right decision to have the baby, according to the head honcho, James Dobson. Indeed, others said, her decision to have the child and get married to the father could even help the GOP ticket, not hinder it.

Charlie Sykes, Milwaukee's Vicki McKenna, was congratulating Dobson for standing behind Palin -- "many families know that being a Christian doesn't make you perfect" -- and giving Obama a pat on the back for saying the right thing. Too bad that "lefty bloggers" weren't doing the same, he said.

As I was reading all this chatter, it dawned on me that the same people who have been telling the rest of us how to bring up our kids -- teach them abstinence, deny them sex education -- were now insisting this is nobody's business but the Palins'.

And they're right, it isn't.

But for decades now many of these folks have been lecturing the rest of the country about "family values," how the Republicans and the Bushes had them and Democrats and people like Al Gore and John Kerry didn't. Remember George Bush the elder's vice president, Dan Quayle, making a national issue out of TV's Murphy Brown deciding to have a child out of wedlock and the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons of the world going apoplectic over TV condoning sin?

Many of the religious right still insist that American families have lost their way and they nostalgically recall the days when moms stayed at home and raised the kids the "right way."

I remember those days well. They weren't all that nice. Girls who got pregnant were ostracized and forced to quit school. They went off somewhere to have their babies. Some got married, some didn't. Their families, especially in small towns, were targets of vicious gossip.

Thank goodness we're a bit more enlightened these days and young women who get pregnant at least get a second chance in life.

Unfortunately, that hasn't been the view usually taken by the long line of religious right leaders of this country -- until now.

Sometimes it takes one of their own -- and a high-profile one at that -- to change some minds.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.

Dave Zweifel  —  9/05/2008 5:23 am