Red Room Where the Writers Are

I don’t believe in “family values.” For as long as there has been a twenty-four hour news cycle, there has been a vocal contingent on the Right that has espoused the neccesity of family values. These people are the anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-contraception and sex education types that feel that since their point of view is supported by God, then they alone are in a position to dictate what societal norms should be.

Now, I’m from Marin County, the ultra-liberal centerpiece of the obnoxiously liberal San Francisco Bay Area. For that reason, many of these family values types would immediately dismiss what I have to say, just because of where I’m from. Don’t believe me? I’ve seen it happen. The rigidity of the conservative Christian mindset is impressive. When fed a belief, particularly when that belief is ordained from on High, there is no longer room for discussion.

I say all this because it was revealed yesterday that the seventeen year old daughter of Alaska Governor and Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant. Not only pregnant but MARRYING the boy who knocked her up. Now I have nothing but sympathy for the daughter, Bristol Palin. She’s a young girl who found herself in a difficult situation. My “liberal outrage” is reserved for her mother, and her mother’s movement that continues to criminalize women’s sexuality.

Right now bigwigs in the McCain campaign are looking for a way to turn this to their advantage. I wish them luck. My real problem, the thing that makes me see red is not the conservative Christian Right. It’s their hypocrisy. Sarah Palin is not simply for abstinence-only education which she feels she has the right to bestow on America but not on her own family. More than that, she is anti-contraception, as difficult a term as I have ever had to type.

This is where they lose me. Anti-contraception? I understand the idea that life begins at conception, as ridiculous as I find it to be. This is so much more. Human beings are hard-wired to have sex. It is everywhere and on everyone’s minds. Who are these people kidding, thinking that they can hold back thousands of years of genetic make-up? It is for this reason that things like Bristol Palin’s pregnancy becomes news.

If the Right is so against abortion then why aren’t they at the front of the sex education movement? Why aren’t they running to equip adolescents with the knowledge they need in order to AVOID having to choose abortion or adoption or raising the child themselves? Five months ago Bristol Palin was probably thinking about college and growing up and living the good life with a mom in the Governor’s Mansion. Now she is with child and engaged to marry her 16 year old boyfriend. Her life will never be like she probably prayed it would be. And it’s her mom’s fault.