One poor kid
I woke up this morning with many thoughts about Sarah Palin I was eager to blog about...and then I read about her daughter's pregnancy. I had a lot of reactions in a hurry. I'm an Obama supporter, so I find it hard not to welcome any news that might distract or embarrass the Republican campaign. But I'm also the father of a teenager. And I think about this poor kid, already dealing with the embarrassment of being the daughter of an Evangelical Christian who's gotten pregnant out of wedlock and the anxiety of becoming a mother before she's even entered adulthood, now having to go through it all in the public eye. Being plastered on the cover of People and Us, made fun of by Jay Leno and Jon Stewart, chased by paparazzi trying to capture her swelling belly, mocked all over the internet, turned into a snarky national buzzword, picked apart as a "campaign liability" for an entire national party. I'm sorry this happened to her. I'm sorry she has a mother willing to put her through this in order to further her personal ambition. I wish her and her baby well. And I don't think I want to say any more about it.
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Rosy Cole says:
Child sacrifice
Thank you for having the courage to say this, Gerry. Human compassion and ordinary decency are too often a casualty of the monomania for fame, money and the lust for control.
Having experienced Evangelical Christian fundamentalism at first hand, I know how skewed the application of its core beliefs can become and how lives can be blighted by the fervour of its adherents in putting a spurious 'God-stamp' on everything they do. Believe me, they always know the mind of God. It's why, at the other end of the spectrum, Catholics are ever mindful of the dangers of Relativism. And if their disciplines seem sometimes to chafe and to impose unnecessary hardship (and are not immune from perversion) at least they're coming from a place of humility which points out a path of penance and freely exposes mankind to the lavish Grace of God in every kind of crisis.
When Jesus Christ was born, Joseph, his father in God's stead, was guided to protect Mary from public scandal.
The issue is not whether the Palin pregnancy should be hypocritically concealed (were that possible) but whether the girl's mother should be exposing her to the world's glare in fulfilment of her own agenda when all the child probably needed in the first place was a mother's natural and undivided attention through the minefield of adolescence.
Perhaps those who believe, and even those who don't, but who are motivated by common humanity, should focus their concern in prayer for this beleaguered daughter of Sarah Palin and her family.
Gerard Jones says:
Shame and scandal
Thanks for this, Rosy. It is hard to watch, as a parent. And there's reason to believe it will take on an even more ghoulish quality before it ends. I've heard from a friend in Alaska that a lot of people there believe the story that the Palin family has called a "smear," that the Governor's new baby is in fact her grandson, born when his mother was 16, and that this publicly announced pregnancy is a fiction. Apparently bets are already being placed on when the campaign is going to announce that Bristol has had a miscarriage. Probably untrue, and surely cruel, but there will probably be many more ugly rumors and speculations like it. As if adolescence weren't hard enough already...