Going Rouge (16 page)

5/ THE PALIN PAGEANT

Sex, God, and Country First

The Elephant in the Room

Dana Goldstein

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. Barack Obama was right to react with disgust Monday when asked if his campaign would make an issue out of Bristol’s pregnancy. Everyone recognizes that Bristol doesn’t deserve that.

At the Republican National Convention in St. Paul Monday, outside of a Lifetime Television event honoring young women leaders, a Lifetime staffer breathlessly relayed the story to GOP Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State. “So she’s keeping the baby. And she’s getting married to her boyfriend. And apparently the McCain people knew.” The congresswoman furrowed her brow.

“Wow,” McMorris Rodgers replied, taking it all in. “Oh my.” She paused. “Politically, I think it would be fine. Personally, I think it would be draining.”

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 twenty-first-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, sixty-three out of every 1,000 young women aged fifteen to nineteen has had a baby. California has the lowest teen birth rate; only thirty-nine of every 1,000 fifteen- to nineteen-year-old girls there have carried a pregnancy to term. Alaska, where Bristol Palin grew up, has a typical teen birth rate of about forty-two.

Here at the convention, self-described family-values conservatives say they are even more thrilled with Sarah Palin since they learned her daughter is pregnant, marrying, and will keep the child. They are convinced that not only is the Alaska governor a paragon of the pro-life movement, unafraid to live out her values in the public eye, but that she is the very epitome of conservative professional motherhood, a woman who pursued her career without limiting her family size (five kids!), teaching her offspring about the sacredness of pregnancy along the way.

Christine Potocki, a GOP activist from upstate New York, says folks from her area have been energized by the addition of Palin to the ticket and won’t be distracted by the news of Bristol’s pregnancy. “I think it fits right into who Sarah Palin is,” Potocki said, “and I think people will relate.” Potocki’s own husband, a convention delegate, has a son from a previous relationship who was conceived out of wedlock. “My husband is pro-life because when he was nineteen years old, he found himself in the same situation and made the decision to have a family,” Potocki confides. “It speaks to the importance of keeping families intact and supporting those who have a choice to make, and they choose life.”

The underlying message is that pregnancy is a gift you should never turn down—even when it‘s unexpected, even when you are seventeen, even when you haven’t had the chance to get an education, or a job, or learn to live as an adult away from your parents. (And even if you’re the victim of domestic violence or have been raped.) In other words, choice, schmoice.

Grace Woodson, a senior at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Virginia, is attending the convention with a group of classmates and explained that Christian conservatives won’t judge Sarah Palin or her family for Bristol’s sexual activity. “Everyone is normal and I think they’ll realize [hard times are] a normal part of life, no matter if you’re conservative or a Democrat,” Woodson said. But like all the conservative women I interviewed, Woodson completely avoided the topic of contraception. “If anything, the way she‘s dealing with it is by respecting her daughter and respecting her daughter’s unborn baby.”

Obviously, many Americans are shuddering at the thought of parents encouraging their seventeen-year-old to become a mother and are wondering whether Bristol got a stern talking to about birth control, or if she considered abortion at all. In March, Obama, himself the son of a teen mom, was excoriated by the right when he said, in support of comprehensive sex ed, “Look, I got two daughters, nine years old and six years old. I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at age sixteen, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.”

The outrage spurred by the “punishment” language was completely predictable, and evidence of just how wide the cultural chasm remains between conservatives and liberals in America. Amid a failing economy and a foreign war, nothing gets people’s blood boiling quite like discussions of sex and abortion. They are still some of the most animating issues in American political life.

Like many conservatives, Jo Howard, a convention delegate from the Houston area, sees Bristol’s pregnancy as an argument for abstinence-only education. That is in spite of the fact that Howard’s own state teaches abstinence-only in every public school, yet boasts the fifth-highest teen pregnancy rate and highest teen birth rate in the nation. “The more we talk about sex, the more kids want to do it,” Howard argues. “What you’re going to see on the Democratic side is that they’re going to push sex education. I think sex education is the problem, and they see it as the solution. These two parties are just totally, totally opposite as far as the issues are concerned. And I think this pregnancy highlights the differences in the two parties.”

That it does. If there’s any larger societal benefit to Bristol Palin becoming the new face of American teen pregnancy, it might be that her story, alongside that of Britney Spears’s kid sister, Jamie Lynn, cuts into stereotypes of all teen moms being black or Latina, or coming from poor families. And if Bistol, with support from her parents, is able to raise her child, make her marriage work, and still get a college education and begin a career, she might even be able to prove to many skeptics that teen pregnancy does not have to leave a young woman’s life in ruins.

It is unfortunate, though, that this normal American teen will have her life choices and outcomes placed under a microscope. One wonders, once again, exactly what John McCain was thinking when he named Sarah Palin his running mate. If McCain wanted to turn this election into a debate over divisive cultural issues, though, it seems he made a very savvy move.

What Scarlet Letter?

Hanna Rosin

When I first heard about Sarah Palin’s, uh, domestic irregularities, I expected social conservatives to react with a kind of qualified, patronizing support—we are all sinners, there but for the grace of God, something like that. Instead, they are embracing her with unbridled admiration. The Family Research Council praised her for “choosing life in the midst of a difficult situation.” Cathie Adams of the Eagle Forum, a conservative women’s group, called her “the kind of woman I’ve been looking for all along.” The two difficult pregnancies—Palin’s with a Down syndrome baby and now her unmarried teenage daughter’s—are just proof that “they’re doing everything right,” gushes Adams. Even the stern religious right godfather James Dobson doted: “A lot of people were praying, and I believe Sarah Palin is God’s answer.”

Some of this reaction can be explained just by listing the religious right’s priorities in order. In the pantheon of family values, avoiding abortion sits at the top, above marriage or staying home to raise your children. Conservatives have spent the last thirty years seeding the country with crisis pregnancy centers dedicated to convincing young women not to abort their babies, regardless of their personal situations. The fact that Britney Spears’s younger sister made the same decision to keep her pregnancy at seventeen and that
Juno
was a hit movie only adds an unexpected glamour to the choice.

But this explanation takes you only so far. What’s missing from the conservative reaction is still remarkable. Just fifteen years ago, a different Republican vice president was ripping into the creators of
Murphy Brown
for flaunting a working woman who chose to become a single mother. This time around, there’s no stigma, no shame, no sin attached to what Dan Quayle would once have mockingly called Bristol Palin’s “lifestyle” choices. In fact, so cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin’s wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison. “I think a hard-working, well-organized CEO type can handle it very well,” said Phyllis Schlafly, of the Eagle Forum.

Suddenly it’s the Obamas, with their oh-so-perfect marriage and their Dick Van Dyke in the evenings and their two boringly innocent young girls, who seem like the fuddy-duddies.

What happened? How did the culture war get flipped on its head? Of course, conservatives are partly lining up behind Palin just so they can stay in the game. But it’s not all crass opportunism. To any religious conservative, Palin, with all her contradictions and hypocrisies, is a very familiar type in this peculiar moment in evangelical history.

Starting in the 1970s, leaders such as Dobson began rewriting the rules of the traditional Christian marriage to make it more palatable in an age of feminism. Domestic work was elevated to a special calling; Christian women were told their child-rearing decisions had national implications, as they were raising a generation of righteous soldiers. Mom took on a political tinge. Homeschooling mothers dragged their large broods to volunteer in campaigns. Like with many Christian moms of her generation, Palin’s résumé starts with the PTA.

In the Gingrich era, a few of the Christian mom-types, including Palin, broke out and started their own political careers. Andrea Seastrand was an elementary school teacher elected to Congress in California in those years. Linda Smith, of Washington State, kept a blown-up picture of her granddaughters in her congressional office. I remember interviewing her one day while her husband, Vern, sat in a hard chair in a corner and gave words to the obvious contradiction: “One of the reasons we got into politics, we wanted to preserve some of the traditional lifestyle we’d grown up with,” Vern told me. “It’s funny, with Linda away, we end up sacrificing some of that traditional family life to pass some of that heritage to our children.”

Conservative women became a powerful tool for the party, and everyone was willing to overlook the cost to their personal lives. If a conservative Christian mother chose to pursue a full-time career in, say, landscape gardening or the law, she was abandoning her family. But if she chose public service, she was furthering the godly cause. No one discussed the sticky domestic details: Did she have a (gasp!) nanny? Did her husband really rule the roost anymore? Who said prayers with the kids every night? As long as she was seen now and again with her children, she could get away with any amount of power.

The larger Palin clan, meanwhile, reflects a different trend among evangelicals. The stereotype we associate with evangelicals—intact marriage, wife at home, teenage daughter saves it for marriage—actually applies only to the small minority who attend church weekly.

The rest of the 30 percent of Americans who call themselves evangelical have started to slip in their morals and now actually poll worse than the rest of America on traditional measures of upstanding behavior—they are just as likely to live together and have kids out of wedlock, and their teenage daughters lose their virginities at an earlier age than the girls of most Americans. University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox blames this partly on class differences and particularly on a lingering “redneck” Appalachian strain in evangelical culture. (I’m a “fucking redneck,” wrote Levi, the father of Bristol’s baby, on his MySpace page, before it was taken down.)

In that way, Bristol’s pregnancy can be spun as just another one of the Palins’ impeccable working-class credentials—salmon fisherman, union member, DWI, hockey mom, soldier son, pregnant teenage daughter.

The most remarkable differences between the large mass of evangelicals and the rest of Americans are in divorce statistics. Since the seventies, evangelicals and the coastal elites have effectively switched places. Evangelicals are now far more likely to get divorced, whereas couples with four years of college education have cut their divorce rates in half. An intact happy marriage that produces well-behaved children, it turns out, is becoming a luxury of the elites—bad news for the Obamas.

Sarah Palin’s Shotgun Politics

Gary Younge

Let’s hear it for Bristol Palin. The pregnant seventeen-year-old daughter of John McCain’s vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin, is going to have her baby and marry her beau, Levi Johnston. That’s a brave move, and she deserves all the support she can get. It looks like she’ll need it. Her eighteen-year-old husband-to-be describes himself as a “fuckin’ redneck.” His MySpace page (which has since been taken down) said he is in a relationship and doesn’t want kids. Bristol’s mom and dad, we are told, are delighted. We know because they issued a statement. “We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents.” Good for them. Now they would like us to talk about something else. “We ask the media to respect our daughter and Levi’s privacy,” they said. Not so fast.

The fact is, Bristol could make the decision to keep the baby only because, in legal terms at least, she had a choice. A choice, as it happens, that her mother wants to criminalize. Contrary to popular wisdom, the decisive issue in Sarah Palin’s vice presidential nomination was not her gender but her views on abortion. Had she not been anti-choice she never would have made it onto the ticket. The principal objection to McCain’s purported favorites for the job—Joseph Lieberman and Tom Ridge—was that they support abortion rights. The woman who would like us to keep her daughter’s pregnancy a private matter is running for office so that she can make the pregnancies of other people’s daughters an affair of the state.

There is precious little to gloat about here. It is depressing how quickly attacks on Palin and her family descend into misogyny, as was the case with Hillary Clinton. Speculation as to how Palin could possibly balance her responsibilities as a mother of five with the vice presidency, or whether her daughter “strayed” because her mother was too preoccupied with work, is inappropriate and offensive. McCain has seven children—two of whom are older than Sarah Palin—and those questions are never asked about him. Bristol Palin is not fair game.

But that does not mean that her pregnancy is not worthy of comment, for two reasons. First, as a public official her mother has embraced positions that would deny others the options her daughter has enjoyed, would deny access to information about preventing unplanned pregnancies and deny support for those in a similar situation. In Alaska, she opposed programs that teach teenagers about contraception and slashed funding for a shelter for teenage mothers. Meanwhile, her running mate has voted to increase funding for abstinence-only education and to terminate the federal family-planning program, and he voted against funding teen-pregnancy-prevention programs. He has also voted to require teenagers seeking birth control at federally funded clinics to obtain parental consent. Unfortunately for Bristol, her mother’s public positions make her personal predicament a teachable moment.

Second, Palin decided to showcase her personal life, and particularly her motherhood, as a centerpiece of her candidacy. McCain introduced her to the country in Dayton, Ohio, as “someone who grew up in a decent, hardworking middle-class family.” He went on to say, “I am especially proud to say in the week we celebrate the anniversary of women’s suffrage, [she is a] devoted wife and mother of five,” as though you should see being married and giving birth to a slew of kids as somehow connected to having the vote. Palin then took time to introduce “four out of five” of her “blessings” (including Bristol) and herself as a “hockey mom” and the “mother of one of those troops” fighting in Iraq.

If she doesn’t want her children in the line of fire, she shouldn’t introduce them to the battlefield or use her parenting as a weapon. That goes for Barack Obama, John McCain, and Joe Biden as well.

When news of Bristol’s pregnancy broke, Obama said, “I think people’s families are off limits. I think people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as governor or her potential performance as a vice president.”

Mostly true and fair enough (one shudders to think what the right wing would make of it if the Obama girls were to find themselves in a similar situation ten years from now). But if family and children are off limits, then do us all a favor and keep them the hell off the stage and away from the microphones. Public office seems to be the only career for which people think it is not only acceptable but necessary to interview the spouse and view the brood for the job. The notion that Americans might elect someone single, let alone gay, to the presidency seems far less likely than the chances of electing a black man or a white woman. And so we are force-fed this hetero-fest with tales of first dates and familial bliss and then asked to look the other way when the facade cracks. If politicians really don’t want the public to examine their families, they should follow a new code: Don’t tell, then we won’t have to ask.

In the meantime, the party of abstinence-only programs did not miss a beat as it stepped up to suffocate Bristol in its embrace. After all, she is having the child and getting married. Only the timing is off. “Now she’s a typical American family,” Kris Bowen, an alternate delegate from Indiana, told the
New York Times
, referring to Palin. “On an individual level, every single person is thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, that has happened to me or someone I know or I’m afraid it will.’ ” It is heartening to know that under all of those vile policies there lies some human compassion. But that does not make the policies any less vile or their consequences any less dire. That Bristol’s situation should become national news is unfortunate. She is not the first seventeen-year-old to have to make this kind of decision. But if her mom has her way, she could be one of the last.