Praise the Lord and pass the denial.
There's an interesting article over at The New Yorker about the incongruent attitudes about pre-marital sex and teen pregnancy among Christian conservatives.
During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
I think there are two things here worth noting. First, I tend to think this nonplussed reaction to teenage pregnancy is just an extension of the culture of denial that surrounds sexual behavior in these groups. It harks back to the days when you bundled your kid off to live with a distant cousin "for her health" to avoid the embarrassment of having an unwed, pregnant teenager in the house. They just pretend it didn't ever happen, just like they pretend their teenagers aren't horny and dancing in the sheets. Today's version of packing your daughter off to live with the relatives is to play the whole issue down, demonstrate to the world how open-minded and compassionate you are and talk about how your are proud of your daughter because she has "decided to take responsibility for [her] actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child." I'd be willing to bet things weren't that calm in the house when her daughter dropped the bomb that she was pregnant. I'd also be willing to bet the decision to get married was a lot more about ultimatums and less about decisions.
The second piece plays into why Sarah Palin is such a hit: everybody's doing it. I can just see two women at some church social, pausing at the punch bowl: "You have an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter? Me, too!" There's a sense of camaraderie that seems to exist. These women can sympathize with "poor Sarah" and the "trials and tribulations" she must be going through because of the dreadful choices of her wayward daughter. Never mind that's hardly a reason to put someone in the White House. Never mind that it was their deliberate misinformation about the realities of sex that got their daughters there in the first place.
HT: Greg Prince