the Palin family

I was hoping to avoid actually saying this but it isn't going away: the Palin family has a pregnant teen daughter.

Between this and all the railing about Palin being pro-life ("therefore not fit for vp"), this election now seems to have been hijacked by sexuality.

(But for the fourteenth time today, I digress....)

To liberals, this is a big "gotcha" because it's proof of hypocrisy and a reminder that abstinence-only education is a failure*.

To conservatives, however, all it proves is that liberals are the hypocrites. Conservatives don't typically try to pretend that unwanted pregnancy never happens.

On the contrary, there is an enormous resentment there, and liberals risk unleashing that resentment if they continue attacking the Palin family.

Conservatives that I know seriously resent how liberals gloat that abstinence doesn't work - when the liberals themselves are doing everything in their power to undermine the concept, promoting the idea that any child whose parents have the "wrong" view on sexuality is a child that needs rescuing, and defending a culture saturated with images and teachings promoting the idea that promiscuity is normal and natural, virginity is weird and unnatural (and sort of repulsive), and of course parents who try to pass down conservative views on sexuality to their offspring are unpleasant, prudish, untrustworthy, horrid people (and therefore it's okay to lie to them if you don't want them to know about your abortion, or that nasty little bout of syph, or whatever**).

Liberals who attack Bristol Palin are opening Pandora's box full of backlash.
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* the one thing I can't figure out is what any of this has to do with the office of VP....

** is there anything more insulting than the presupposition that if a kid does not want to tell her folks about sexual activity and/or its consequences, it must be proof that there's something wrong with the parents? And therefore they don't need or deserve to know what is going on? Gee, maybe you can just assume that dad is probably the father of the baby-to-be while you're making up your own version of events!

(And this logic from the same people who shrieked loudest about doctors diagnosing Terri Schiavo without actually looking at her first....)