That Girl?
How the Republicans fell in love with a pregnant, unwed teenager.
by Lynn Harris
September 3, 2008
When Bristolgate broke, my friends and I immediately started running email victory laps.
No longer would the GOP be, as my friend Colin had written, "falling all over themselves to light Sarah Palin's cigarette." We were positive that while McCain was busy pimping his wife at a topless beauty pageant, and his staff was distracted with counting his houses, somehow they'd wound up tapping this Red State huntress without vetting anything but her gender. And now, post-announcement, they were learning about Palin's seventeen-year-old daughter's pregnancy right along with us, the public, in glorious real time. This, we grinned, was not going to play in Peoria.
But the more I saw the right wing's reaction to the pregnancy news, the more I realized that of course Palin had been vetted. Vetted like a hunting party vets a bull moose, premarital pregnancy and all. With the aim of mesmerizing and wooing the GOP's Christian conservative base, McCain chose Palin very much on purpose. I'm not talking about Sarah Palin. I'm talking about her daughter, Bristol.
Ever since the news broke, the Christian right has been defending — nay, championing — the fruitful-and-multiplying Palins, including the unwed teenage one. As the AP reported, "Prominent religious conservatives, many of whom have been lukewarm toward McCain's candidacy, predicted that the announcement [that Bristol was pregnant] would not diminish conservative Christian enthusiasm for the vice presidential hopeful, a staunch abortion opponent. In fact, there was talk that it might help."
"Help" by serving as tangible evidence of Sarah Palin's anti-choice politics? That's the standard explanation, but it doesn't entirely make sense. Her anti-choice credentials — opposing abortion even in cases of rape or incest — are well-established. She hardly needed to prove her position with a teen pregnancy carried to term. So what does young Bristol Palin really represent to the Religious Right?
A narrative in which a wayward girl gets married to her high-school sweetheart without needing to sleep around first. It's a story that's completely consistent with the evangelicals' pet plotline: delivery from depraved, godless 2008, and a return to 1958 — an allegedly simpler time when aluminum cans were introduced as food storage, The Danny Thomas Show topped the TV ratings, and most crucially, a time when women married their sweethearts and started their families while still very young, before they could enter that dangerous twentysomething period of sexual experimentation.
Despite all the brouhaha about teenage pregnancies today, Bristol's situation more closely resembles the '50s, when both pregnancy rates and marriage rates were higher than they are today. In the '50s, Americans were marrying younger than they had in generations, and many of those marriages were of the shotgun variety. By 1959, nearly half of all brides were younger than nineteen. In 1960, the percentage of unmarried teen births was 15%, compared to 75% today — not because girls weren't getting pregnant, but because they were getting pregnant and married. (Those who dared not marry their baby daddies disappeared for nine months, or faced "abortion committees.")
Bristol, with her baby bump and her approaching wedding, is the new pinup girl for conservatives: She's safely and solidly en route to traditional, '50s-style wedlock, allowing her parents, her pastor, and Christians everywhere to breathe a sigh of relief that she was locked onto this track early by pregnancy, before the modern world could influence her any more than it already has.
The marriage component of this scenario is critical to social conservatives: carrying a pregnancy to term and marrying the father is noble, but carrying a pregnancy to term and then pulling a Murphy Brown, while better than having an abortion, is far more unsavory. Conservatives even showered some love upon Jamie Lynn Spears — more so than your average People reader did — when she announced her pregnancy and, almost as quickly, her engagement (still pending).
Even abstinence-only education is just a means to an end, a way to get horny kids hitched before they get a chance to live the single life and spend their twenties cavorting with perverts, homos and liberals. "The delay of marriage has caused any number of ills in the larger society, and in the church," writes Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. "Honesty compels us to admit that this is indeed tied to levels of sexual promiscuity and frustration, even as it means that many persons are now marrying well into their adult years, missing the opportunity of growing together as a young couple, and putting parenthood potentially at risk."
The Bible itself says that if you can't control your desires, it's better to marry than to burn with passion. What's more,
recent research by evangelical pollster George Barna found a "troubling" "moral pattern" among adults under twenty-five, whose "choices made even the Baby Boomers — never regarded as a paragon of traditional morality — look like moral pillars in comparison." Specifically: The younger generation is "more than twice as likely as all other adults to engage in behaviors considered morally inappropriate by traditional standards," including engaging in non-marital sex: thirty-eight percent today vs. four percent of Boomers. (For the record, I call bullshit on that "four percent" stat.)
"We are witnessing the development and acceptance of a new moral code in America," writes Barna. "The U.S. has created a moral system based on convenience, feelings and selfishness . . . It is not likely that America will return to a more traditional moral code until the nation experiences significant pain from its moral choices." That is, pain as exemplified by the tribulations of the oh-so-relatable Palin grandparents-to-be, whose daughter — despite their best efforts (and like those gals in the '50s) — succumbed, if temporarily. But now, Bristol appears to reaffirm that "moral code" with her embrace of the early-marriage paradigm, even if the two little pink lines came even earlier.
As an added bonus, statistically speaking, her wedding won't be her last time in a church. Evangelical leaders have made much of sociological
studies suggesting the future of the church depends on getting people to start marrying younger. As Professor W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia has argued, the fate of the nation's Christian congregations will "rise and fall with the fortunes of the intact, married family." Wilcox cites Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow's research revealing that decreases in marriage and childbearing among young adults are "by far the strongest predictors" of declines in church attendance. Wuthnow even argues that if marriage and childbearing rates were not dropping so far, so fast, American churches would now have 6.3 million more young adult congregants. And evangelicals, by definition, are on a mission to expand the flock.
For liberals, sexual experimentation in one's twenties is almost as strong an opposing ideology. Many children of liberal parents are encouraged to experience the world, travel, meet people and, presumably, "get it out of their system." While many liberal parents would be nervous if their child got married while still a teenager, many conservative parents (like Albert Mohler) might see this as a stroke of luck that would keep their child from engaging in a period of young-adulthood debauchery.
"Fortunately, Bristol is following her mother and father's example of choosing life in the midst of a difficult situation," said Family Research Council president Tony Perkins in a statement, referring to reports that Sarah Palin and her husband also "did the right thing" and got married four weeks after Sarah got pregnant. "We are committed to praying for Bristol and her husband-to-be." [emphasis ours]
And: "We're all sinners," Mathew Staver, dean of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University School of Law, told CNN. "We all make mistakes. Certainly, the ideal is not to get pregnant out of wedlock. But [Bristol Palin] made the right decision after her mistake."
Of course, many members of the Christian right will defend Palin to the end solely because that's how badly they want their guy (or at least, not the other guys' guy) to win. And to be utterly fair, some sincere compassion is surely at play here, both for Bristol and her parents. We are all sinners, indeed. (Though can you imagine the reaction if a Clinton or an Obama daughter found themselves in a similar situation?) In fact, it's worth noting that, aside from the fact that she was from Kansas and he was from Kenya, even Barack Obama's mother and father's situation wasn't unusual for its time: In 1960, Obama's mom, Ann Dunham, got pregnant at eighteen and then married Obama's father. Their parents objected to the marriage, not because of her age, as Obama points out in his autobiography, but because they were a mixed-race couple.
Plus, Bristol's pregnancy obviously offers just the distraction the GOP needs from Sarah Palin herself: her gross lack of qualifications, insulting self-linkage to Hillary Clinton, and, possibly, questionable ethics. All of a sudden, Todd "First Dude" Palin's worst offense is not his apparent involvement in the trooper-firing scandal, it's skipping the local Purity Ball. Luckily, Bristol's decision to dutifully marry her boyfriend is making up for it.
All in all, Bristol and her baby are a gift to McCain, who needs the Christian right to energize his malaise-stricken campaign. It's a gift with a card signed by Karl Rove himself, who is surely sitting in a giant armchair somewhere right now, stroking a purring white cat. "Wait it out," he breathes, lip curled. "Just wait it out."
He won't have to wait long. Under the headline "McCain's Effort to Woo Conservatives Is Paying Off," this morning's New York Times reports that even James Dobson, who once thundered that he would not vote for McCain "under any circumstances," is now considering a flip-flop. Question: Would he be as enamored with Bristol if she'd never gotten pregnant in the first place, and instead spent her twenties broadening her sexual horizons safely, responsibly and independently? Not a chance.
©2008 Lynn Harris and Nerve.com