When Pulling Out Is Not An Option

From the NY Times, regarding Sarah Palin's daughter:

At a reception for educators at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Sandra Ross, a special-needs high school teacher from Orlando, Fla, said, “She’s going to be a good role model for the country.” Of Bristol’s pregnancy, Ms. Ross added, “Everybody makes mistakes.”

"Everybody makes mistakes." True. But one wonders what exactly the "mistake" was in this instant. Was it having sex before marriage or having sex without protection? Of course, ostensibly, using birth control is verboten in the Republican world view, which also frowns upon sex before marriage, so really the only applicable "mistake" is in not following an "abstinence-only" approach.

During the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial campaign, Sarah Palin responded thusly to a survey question posed to her:

Will you support efforts to raise or lower the mandatory age of education? Why or why not?
SP: No, again, parents know better than government what is best for their children.

Sarah Palin as a parent and member of government believes that "abstinence-only" is the only appropriate form of sex education. Assuming that Sarah Palin ever talked to her 17-year-old daughter about sex, we must assume that she preached "abstinence-only." It apparently did not work with her daughter. It's fair to wonder then how she can support it as national policy.

(This is all so much faux naif pondering. It's well-documented that preaching abstinence does not work at all, and that teenagers have sex at a pretty much constant rate, regardless of the type of sex-ed they receive. I'd be willing to bet that kids have fucked at the same rate all throughout human history, but that's another story...)

The right-wing will whine and claim that it's unfair to bring these issues up, but she's their choice for vice-president, it's their policies she supposedly espouses, and it's eminently fair to judge them against reality. And anyway, this is national politics, this is hardball, major leagues, this is the Presidential Election - everyone knows that every single speck of dirt about a candidate is going to be dredged up and rehashed in spectacular fashion.

It's infuriating to see Republicans herald a female candidate and then demand she be treated with kid's gloves. Ask Hillary Clinton how gently she was ever treated by the right. I feel bad for the daughter, but her mother advocates policies that simply don't work, and she must be upbraided for it.