“Rednecks,” intelligence and “trashy, low class”
tagged abortion, abstinence, adultery, Barrack Hussein Obama, Bristol Palin, Canada, Johh McCain, Levi Johnston, pregnancy, pro-choice, Sarah Palin and sex
I am in basic agreement with Ken about the whole controversy surrounding Palin and her daughter.
I guess the ‘liberals’* would have a problem with teenage parents getting married — sounds so…50’s. But, I thought that they were pro-choice WHICH INCLUDES THE CHOICE TO CARRY THE CHILD TO TERM, and that they would support decisions which are in line with empirical research that children living with their biological parents have better outcomes in general than children of single parents or those raised by at least one non-biological parent. (This is not to denigrate the work of many industrious single parents or adoptive parents, but only to say that mom and dad tend to do the best (if partly due to selfish genetic reasons operating on a subconscious level)) Thus the decision is the right one, one that even pro-choicers (as they call themselves) must say they support or else they are nothing but abortion advocates, and is ordered toward what will be the best outcomes for the child. Ohh, and has not Obama been preaching, several times recently, that young African-American males should take greater responsibility in the lives of their ‘baby-mamas’? Has he not been telling them to do what the Palin’s and the Johnston’s have encouraged their children to do?
The abortion analysis is also compelling — if teenage pregnancy is a secularist sin, then Bristol is not guilty of any more than several other “ticket children” except that she was ‘caught’.
Also, if Bill’s adultery is not something that ought to be scrutinized (only his honesty about it publicly) why is Palin’s daughter’s indiscretion seen as damning for McCain? As long as Palin is honest, what is the big deal?
Wait…her desire for abstinence education over ‘comprehensive’ education indicates her failure as a mother despite Bristol a) being exposed to a culture through friends that is more lenient on sexual mores, b) being of age for several years according to ‘liberals’ for deciding her sexual life and obtaining ‘remedies’ for ‘problems’ without parental involvement according to those same ‘liberals’ and c) having free will.
If a class refuses to answer questions on a government exam (worth the majority of the students’ mark) but routinely does excellent on class assignments of comparable difficulty to the exam, does that mean the teacher is a bad teacher or that the students chose not to write answers?
Also, I have before me a chart of the smartest cities in Canada and the three cities which routinely elect left of centre politicians are 18th (Toronto), 21st (Vancouver) and 34th (Montreal) while the cities that regularly elect right of centre politicians are 3rd (Calgary), 8th (Edmonton), 12th (Saskatoon) and 17th (Regina). However, the latter are usually derided as being “redneck” and not “sophisticated” like the former, but the latter also have higher percentages who spend money on the arts (ranked 1, 8, 10, 9 respectively) than the former (22, 15, 28 respectively). While economic prowess may be a factor, this certainly makes it look like the ‘liberals’ have some explaining to do. How can the ‘dumb, backwards’ cities have smarter and more cultured populations? Sure the measures are imprecise, but the clear seperation of the groups would indicate something is being captured.
* I have some issues with using that term to designate “left of centre” policies/people since it can denote some “right of centre” values too, such as its close cousin libertarianism
Reader Mail: Bristol Palin’s marriage
tagged abortion, abstinence, Alaska, America, Barrack Hussein Obama, Bristol Palin, Camille Paglia, Chelsea Clinton, David Warren, Down's Syndrome, George Jonas, God, Hamilton, John McCain, John Mellencamp, NRA, Oval Office, pregnancy, pro-life, Sarah Palin, sex and Todd Palin
Every so often, something I write gets wildly misinterpreted. NH provides us with a decent example of what I mean when I say this, in his (?) response to my recent article concerning Bristol Palin, the daughter of presidential candidate John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin. For those who have been living under a rock since last week, Bristol is, at age 17, pregnant. She will be keeping the baby, and will be marrying the father. Moreover, she will be doing both with the full love and support of her family, as has been pledged in a public statement by the Palins.
Not the most ideal of situations (teen pregnancy never is), but certainly not the worst of circumstances either.
So you’d rather she NOT get married and go on welfare?
You Obama nuts kill me.
You’re willing to support some dangerous racist fringe candidate and attack a woman who’s kid did something she had little control over.
Shame on you all.
It would seem I am being mistaken for a supporter of Barrack Hussein Obama, an allegation which even a cursory search of this site should dispel. Perhaps it would be beneficial to re-state some of that which I wrote previously.
Firstly, the point of my writing was to note a disagreement I had with the opinion of another blogger
, albeit one with whom I usually agree. I noted, correctly I think, that there was a moral argument to be made in the case of Bristol’s pregnancy: pregnancy out of wedlock is not something which should be encouraged, and is (in fact) wrong. That she is pregnant does, in fact, indicate that Bristol Palin has made some poor choices in her life. I think we’re within our rights to note as much.
But that’s also where our rights end, in that regard. At the end of the day, what has happened? A teenager made the choice to sleep with her boyfriend, and she got pregnant because of it. This is her mother’s fault…how? Yes, her mother is ardently pro-life, to the point of putting her money where her mouth is and choosing to carry a child with Down’s to term. Yes, her mother is pro-abstinence, and supports teaching abstinence as a part of sex-ed in schools. And yes, legally speaking, Bristol Palin is still the responsibility of her parents, and will be for another year.
She’s still her own person, and she made a bad choice. I don’t see how her bad choices reflect poorly on her mother. Some have speculated that Sarah and Todd Palin have been lax in their duties as parents to impart good sex-ed to their children. Maybe they have been lax — we cannot and do not know — but even if they were, their daughter still had a choice to make between right and wrong, and chose “wrong.” And as to the matter of the possibility of the Palins having been lax in teaching their daughter about sex…well, I come back to the observation that she is still her own person.
As my wife noted previously, one of her sisters is pregnant (indeed, at the time of this writing, I may already be an uncle) out of wedlock — this despite being raised by devout Catholic parents, and despite receiving (I am told) education about sexuality and sexual morality within that framework. The best a parent can hope for is that the lessons imparted to children will, somehow, stick. But there is no way to know for sure, and sometimes even those children raised in the most optimal, moral fashion will choose to go astray. That’s. Life.
And given her situation, I do think Bristol Palin is making the best choices she can. She will not be seeking an abortion1, she will be getting married to the father of the child, and she will be doing so with the full love and support of her family. She’ll have a tough life ahead, at least initially, but she stands a better chance of making it work than the welfare mamas that Kathy decried in the post that I was responding to. And while it’s still not good that Bristol is pregnant at this early age, and then out of wedlock, it is good that she is making the right decisions now.
And no, I don’t think it would be better for Bristol to remain unmarried and go on welfare.
I didn’t say that explicitly, but I did note that Kathy is exactly right that we should want “people better than ‘tacky and low class’ in the White House.” But really, given the respective examples of Sarah Palin and Barrack Obama — the latter of whom defended his stance on abortion by stating his desire to protect his daughters from being “punished with a baby” if they should happen to make a bit of a mistake in the sex department — who is the one who is really tacky and low class? Sarah and Todd Palin, with their messages of accepting responsibility, reminders of just how difficult the road ahead will be for their daughter, and emphasis on the importance of the love and support of family in such times? Or Obama’s “screw now, abort later” attitude?
Who really has the Hamilton ghetto attitude?
Kathy notes that she is happy that Bristol has chosen not to seek an abortion, less happy that she has chosen to wed. I don’t share this view: I think both are positive steps, and I think she will grow up quite a lot thanks to both of them. Bristol Palin will indeed have a tough road ahead. But she will have the loving support of her family, she will have a child to nurture and love, and she will have a husband who may just turn out to be a decent sort who will love and care for her “till death do they part.” Stranger things have happened, and as fates go that one is not so terrible at all. Bristol is unlikely to become another welfare baby mama…and that is a good thing.
And in the end, I don’t think Bristol’s pregnancy will be detrimental to the McCain/Palin (or, as George Jonas suggests, Palin/McCain (can’t we flip the ticket?)) campaign. If anything, it will increase the already broad appeal that Palin has with the Heartland voters. Even many liberals are noting the brilliance of Palin’s selection:
“We may be seeing the first woman president. As a Democrat, I am reeling,” said Camille Paglia, the cultural critic. “That was the best political speech I have ever seen delivered by an American woman politician. Palin is as tough as nails.”
…
“Good Lord, we had barely 12 hours of Democrat optimism,” said Paglia. “It was a stunningly timed piece of PR by the Republicans.”
At the same time, Palin’s appeal on the “traditional values” scale couldn’t be higher, I don’t think. She hunts and is a member of the NRA. She has five kids, all with the same husband, to whom she has been happily married for 20 years. She’s a former teen beauty queen runner-up, he’s an oilpatch roughneck and commercial fisherman. They’re both active churchgoers. My goodness…John Mellencamp could not contrive a more “All American” couple on his best day. And here’s the best part: it’s not uncommon to find her youngest two children in her office as governor of Alaska — Trig, the youngest, even has his own crib therein, a point David Warren did not miss:
To the people who work hard for a living; who pay taxes instead of collecting food stamps and subsidies; who face the vagaries of life with gratitude for existence, and take their lumps and setbacks in their stride; who raise multiple children instead of perhaps one designer child; who go to church on Sunday, and believe on Jesus; who volunteer for civic tasks, donate money to real charities, help each other materially in distress; who otherwise mind their own private business and expect others to mind theirs; and who, among other quaint customs, love the fresh air, and indulge such pleasures as hunting and fishing, through which they acquire a sense of stewardship over the land — Sarah Palin is the bee’s knees.
…
That she could wind up as President, inspires a gulp — with a Down’s syndrome kid in a playpen by the executive desk in the Oval Office. If God were to contrive a pro-life statement, it might look like that.
And let us not forget to mention the whole “Margaret Thatcher of the Frozen North” vibe that even a cursory glimpse at Palin’s record in office makes plain. She took on the corruption of her own party, even to the point of resigning from a six-figure-salary position when adequate action was not taken. She then ran for election against a popular incumbent and won, despite the fact that elements of her own party actually held fundraisers for the other guy. And she has consistently shown no tolerance whatsoever for corruption or money-wasting projects. Yes, she supports drilling in the wildlife reserves in Alaska…but by the same token, she is no friend of big oil either: she signed into law a massive “windfall tax” levied against oil developers in the state.
1) Ace remarks upon something interesting about Bristol’s pregnancy, balancing it against the statistics for unexpected pregnancies in the general population, and against the general pool of children of other presidential candidates (and those of their running mates).
Although it would be unnecessarily cruel and invasive to wonder about which specific daughters of previous presidential and vice presidential candidates may have had an “invisible pregnancy” — that is, one terminated by abortion — it’s less invasive to simply take the cohort as a group and play the percentages game.
Saletan here, for reasons I would call “mystifying” but are anything but, restricts the possible candidates to those between ages 17 and 30 when their fathers stood for election, rather than stood for election and then served, which is an utterly contrived parameter designed specifically to exclude Chelsea Clinton (who was of course dating during her dad’s term, and was 16 when he ran for re-election) from consideration. Note how they yet bend over backwards to refrain from smearing a child whose parents they like.
Nevertheless, that’s a minor quibble, and if Saletan had to do that to get his piece published and/or not send liberals screaming blue murder, fine, we’ll work with his transparently contrived parameters. There’s no particular reason we need Chelsea Clinton in the cohort.
Doesn’t matter. Might be even better if we didn’t name any particular names listed at all (just ages) and just dealt with the presidential daughters as pure actuarial abstractions, anyhow. We don’t care which of the presidential and vice presidential daughters may have become pregnant; that’s their business.
We only care about the likelihoods that one or several of them have been pregnant, “invisibly,” at some point, whomever they might be.
An unintended pregnancy rate of 6 to 7 percent, in a population of 37 women, means two to three pregnancies per year. Even if you discount the rate further, on the grounds that these are the wealthiest and best-educated families, the notion that none of these young women got knocked up before their parents’ nominations or elections is—pardon the term—almost inconceivable….
Most unintended pregnancies in the higher income and education brackets end in abortion.
Remember that before you judge or poke fun at Sarah Palin. She’s not the candidate whose daughter messed up. She’s the candidate who didn’t get rid of the mess.
Have all the presidential and vice presidential daughters really all been either abstinent, infertile, or extraordinarily well-disciplined in using birth control properly, even during those fumbling and reckless late teenaged years? Extraordinarily doubtful.
Bristol Palin is an anomaly, and is a first, and is noteworthy. And she is, I suppose, therefore worthy of media commentary, but not for the reason they insist–
She’s the only one who decided to have her baby rather than abort it.
Ace goes on to note that if we don’t just restrict the sample population, above, to daughters, the numbers only become more damning when weighed against the statistics.
That about sums it up
tagged abstinence, celibacy and sex
Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred have a guest post by a reader that, in one paragraph, more or less exactly sums up what seems to have gone wrong with the way the world thinks about sex these days.
I am not a prude. I am not a person who considers sex to be dirty or “bad”. I am not offended by sexual content in movies, television, and literature. I am not a nun. Hell, I’m not even Catholic. Someday, I would very much like to have sex, and I am glad that in these modern times, people can have as much of whatever kind of sex they prefer as they want. I am not judgmental or homophobic. I think everyone has a right to express themselves sexually (with the obvious exceptions of rape, incest, and child molestation). I have many friends who are in sexual relationships — many of whom are very happy. I am happy for them. Not just that they are having sex and enjoying it, but that they are in relationships that make them happy in many different ways — sex being only one of those many kinds of happiness. I also have friends who have had sex because they felt pressured by their date and by society to go all the way. That’s what people do, right? You’re dating someone, and having sex is just part of it. If you’re not doing it, there’s something wrong with you. The Sexual Revolution has gone so far that it is not about freedom anymore. It, like everything eventually does, has come full-circle to the point of demanding conformity.
People seem to think it laughable to suggest that abstinence and celibacy are alternative modes of sexual expression, but in a very concrete way they are. That the human being is a sexual being is beyond debate; of course we are. So choosing to abstain for some temporary duration, or to outright give up that aspect of one’s being is certainly a form of expressing one’s sexuality, although it may have other considerations.
And while it seems absurd that society might be anything other than tolerant of those who elect to postpone or entirely give up sex for one reason or another, what actually seems to result is that where in the past those who engaged in promiscuous sex were stigmatized, now it is those who abstain from promiscuity who are stigmatized. Heck, I’ve even had one professor tell me that he was infuriated and fed up with meeting female students who were, at the age of 25, still virgins.
Parse that for a moment, O Reader. The sentiment is hardly unique to just one person that I’ve met.
Not having sex is a valid choice, and yet society seems not to encourage it at all. Why is this?
An old observation, but worth restating
tagged abortion, abstinence, birth control, casual sex, chastity, CSI, CSI: Miami, feminism, fertility, Janie Fredell, Law and Order, men, sex and women
If men are commonly more promiscuous than women, it is only because the culture allows it, she said. Fredell was here to turn society around. “It’s extremely countercultural,” she said, for a woman to assert control over her own body. It is, in fact, a feminist notion. Conventional feminism, she explained, teaches that control of your body means the freedom to have sex without consequences — sex like a man. “I am an unconventional feminist,” Fredell said, in the sense that she asserts control by choosing not to have sex — by telling men, no, absolutely not.
The ladies at ProWomanProLife point out that much of modern feminism, as opposed to classic feminism, seems to be infused with a certain…indignation or repulsion where a woman’s reproductive system is concerned. A woman is not, it seems, “liberated” until and unless she has taken measures to deactivate what is, for her body, a natural and expected process — i.e. her fertility cycle, ostensibly as a means to engaging in the same manner of casual sex that men are able to. In other words, feminism has stopped being about the equality of women as persons*, and has mutated, in a certain sense, to being about making women into men without penises.
Of course, at the same time, it has become about suppressing distinctly masculine traits as well, as we can see effected in, for example, many a school around the world, where physical play has been discouraged or all but outlawed in the name of “safety” (and, methinks, for fear of litigation).
I’m reminded of a joke about the clothes of college students which, as the comedian would have it, eventually all become of one colour — some variant of gray — because it is of course more economical to repeatedly wash the coloured clothes with the white clothes. In a certain sense, that is what is happening through the actions of modern feminism; all the little things which make men and women vibrant in their uniqueness from each other is being stripped away and reduced to a dull gray in the name of a false notion of equality.
And yet at the same time as it is seeking to do this, our culture — ever mired in contradictions — has elevated sex (and then an unthinking, random derivation thereof) to the status of Holiest of Holies. This is, in some respects, what could be termed a positive feedback reaction; increased promiscuity underscores the need for more and “better” birth control options, while the range of more and “better” birth control options encourages people to discard traditional sexual morality in favour of increased promiscuity. Some might dispute the latter half of that sentence, but even a casual glance at rates of, say, teenage pregnancy or common-law cohabitation over the last half-century will show that this has been exactly the case, or that there exists — at least — a strong correlation in this regard.
And out of all of this, what has emerged? In some respects, we’ve come to an age where women are now more objectified than ever. Watch an episode of Law and Order from its first few seasons that dealt with a sexual crime, and then watch an episode of the same series that deals with a similar sort of crime from one of the last couple seasons. For a chaser, do the same experiment with an episode of CSI from its first couple seasons that deals with a sexually-driven crime, followed by an episode of CSI: Miami dealing with the same subject matter.
In each example, the latter will feature more explicit material, almost to the point of eroticism in the case of CSI: Miami. And in addition to detracting from the show, what is demonstrated by this observation? Do long, panning, multi-angle cuts of dancing strippers really serve to advance the plot of a police procedural drama? Methinks not, and yet such imagery has become commonplace today, whereas a decade ago it would have seemed out of place.
Funnily, the only weapon that women have against this continued (and accelerating) sexual objectification is the one that modern feminism rejects most fiercely: abstinence. We’re told, ad nauseum, that “no means no,” are we not? And yet, one hardly hears of feminists encouraging women to exert that ability to say “no” on a regular basis, as a lifestyle framework. What better way for a woman to exert control over her own body than by telling any interested sexual partners that they’ll just have to wait. It’s a pretty good way to weed out the losers, I’m told.
* I make this distinction because were the issue solely about women having, as persons, the same rights (legally and morally) as men, birth control would never have emerged. Recognizing and embracing a person’s “personhood” (if the Reader will permit my clumsy language here) is about recognizing and embracing all of a person, both the ways they are alike to us and the ways in which they differ from us. Equality, as it should be understood, is not a question of rote function, nor is it a question of raw capabilities, but instead a recognition that while obvious differences do exist between any two groups, there is nevertheless a common, intrinsic, an inalienable value to both groups that cannot be diminished or infringed upon.
Mary was a perpetual virgin? By the Numbers.
tagged abstinence, Blessed Virgin, Book of Numbers, Joseph, marriage, Mary, Mosaic Law, Old Testament, perpetual virginity, sex, sin, the Bible and the Church
Absolutely awesome exegesis on a section of vows in the Book of Numbers, and its implications for the Catholic doctrine concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary’s perpetual virginity.
It is discussion three kinds of vows:
1. Vows of sexual abstinence taken by a young, unmarried woman.
2. Vows of sexual abstinence taken by a married woman.
3. Vows of sexual abstinence taken by a widow or divorced woman.In all three cases, the binding nature of the vow is dependant on whether the male party (whether father or husband), upon hearing of the vow, said nothing and in thereby consented to it. In each case, if he heard the vow and accepted it, the vow is perpetually binding.
Now, what this means is that if a young Jewish woman–say, Mary, in this instance–took a vow of sexual abstinence, and her legal husband–in our case, Joseph–heard of the vow and said nothing, then the vow stands, and she is bound to keep it. This provides a solid historical basis for Joseph and Mary having a perpetually virginal marriage: indeed, Numbers is very explicit in the final verse that if the husband changes his mind “and makes them null and void after he has heard of them,” the the sin will be upon him: “he shall bear her iniquity” (Num 30:15). One can easily imagine a situation where some husbands would think better of deciding to accept such a vow! But as Matthew’s Gospel tells us: Joseph was a “righteous man” (Matt 1:19), and obedient to Torah. If Mary took a vow of sexual abstinence–and her words “How can this be, since I know not man?” in Luke are evidence that she did (Luke 1:34)–and if Joseph accepted this vow at the time of their wedding, then he would have been bound by Mosaic Law to honor her vow of sexual abstinence under the penalty of sin.
However implausible it may sound to a sex-saturated Western culture that a man would ever do such a thing, the fact of the matter is that the Old Testament appears to assume it as a real possibility. Indeed, the fact that an entire chapter of the Bible is devoted to it appears to suggest that vows of sexual abstinence on the part of women must have been a visible enough part of the culture that a law was necessary to deal with the situation! (This should come as no surprise to students of antiquity; consecrated virgins were part of the religious landscape of the ancient world). Should there be any doubt about this, I would suggest in passing that the reader call to mind the controversy that faced Pauline churches about young widows renegging on their vows of sexual abstinence (1 Timothy 4) and the otherwise difficult and confusing passage in 1 Corinthians about what a man should do about marrying his “virgin” (1 Cor 7:36-38). If both these texts apply to the situation envisaged in Numbers 30, then Mary’s situation is anything but unique in culture.
