Monday, September 01, 2008 - Posts
-
sponsorship
- Learn about al-Qaida.
- Learn about Washington, D.C.
- Order Bristol's dress (Elastic waist!!! Is white inappropriate after six months?)
- Fire brother-in-law.
- Learn about Russia/Georgia/S. Ossetia (Locate Abkhazia???)
- Nurse Baby Trig.
- Order flowers for wedding.
- Fire people who haven't fired brother-in-law.
- Learn about ethics rules.
- Fire at brother-in-law? (Option: aerial shooting?)
- Nurse Baby Trig.
- Learn about Iran.
- Learn about U.S. Senate.
- Learn about contraception. (Too late???)
- Investigate homes for foundlings?
- Govern Alaska.
- Life insurance on J.M.?
-
sponsorship
Slate spouse Nora Krug sends in this guest post to XX Factor:
Of course, Bristol Palin is not the first vice-presidential child to be pregnant out of wedlock. That honor goes to Mary Cheney. (Perhaps this is something the GOP vetting committee looks for?)
But at least Bristol is allowed to get married.
-
sponsorship
It's interesting that the original rumor had Sarah Palin in the role of the sacrificial mother, protecting her daughter from exposure as a knocked-up teenager and presumably guaranteeing the baby an upbringing in a firmly established family. The real story has Sarah Palin plunging into the limelight, thereby guaranteeing that it's the whole nation, not merely Bristol's high school peers and their parents, who know her daughter's situation. And this baby—certainly if Palin's ticket wins—can't exactly count on doting grandparents at the ready to back up the teenage newlyweds. As between the two scenarios, it strikes me that the first in fact might fly better, not just with the evangelical, pro-family base, but with everybody else, too. And what, I wonder, does the comparison tell us about the stigma, or lack thereof, of teenage pregnancy? The rumor presumed it was something to hide; the reality suggests it's fine to flaunt it. Ah, for the old days of the simple culture war paradigm, when "traditional" nuclear family values reigned in red America.
-
sponsorship
Slate's Jim Ledbetter sends in the following guest post:
The irony struck me while watching cable television from my Denver hotel room on Friday morning: A kind of token feminism had finally hit the Republican Party, and was immediately being questioned by—of all people—cable television commentators. Does anyone believe that the blowdried blonds (male and female, but for purposes of this argument, female) who read newscasts from teleprompters are chosen strictly for their journalistic skills? Putting women in front of the camera—like putting women on the covers of magazines—is a proven way of attracting the attention of media consumers both male and female. It should come as little surprise that the McCain campaign—which has never come anywhere near 50 percent support in any credible national poll—sought to apply this same media logic to politics. Don’t get me wrong: I share completely the view that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be the vice president of the United States, and that McCain’s choice is a world-class act of cynical political calculation, rather than any attempt to put “Country First.” At the same time, neither liberals nor conservatives have figured out the right balance between rewarding “qualified” women and sheer representation of women in places where it is deemed to matter. The logic of affirmative action is that given equal or near-equal conditions, preference should be given to members of historically underrepresented groups. The current contortions through which Republicans are trying to argue that Palin is qualified can be read as an argument that gender representation trumps experience, an argument not unfamiliar on the democratic left, and certainly not on cable television. And anyway, if McCain and Palin end up losing, who doubts that CNN and Fox will be competing to offer her a show?
-
sponsorship
A few years ago, I went to a wedding, in the trippy hillside Israeli town Szefat, between an ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israeli and his Dutch soon-to-be-convert bride. She was eight months pregnant, her bulge apparent even under the white tentlike cotton that covered her from head to foot. Szefat is the place Jews go to dabble in mysticism and born-again Judaism. You might think that a knocked-up bride there would inspire, if not condemnation, at least embarrassed jokes. But I saw only joy and celebration around me: The only thing that mattered was that the bride would marry and convert before the birth of the child, making him a Jew (because Jewish law recognizes only matrilineal descent).
American evangelical Christians aren't the Jews of Szefat, of course. But on this point, I think fundamentalists of different faiths agree far more than they differ. I can't imagine Bristol Palin's pregnancy will be condemned much, if at all, by the religious base that Palin was picked to attract. Instead, the emphasis will all be on her impending marriage and on praising her parents for standing by her. At first, I didn't really believe that John McCain knew about the pregnant daughter when he tapped for his veep the mother whose abstinence teachings didn't take. But the more I think about it, the more I think McCain may have known and plunged ahead regardless, counting on Bristol's redemption to save his choice—and serve up a mesmerizing and distracting soap opera, too, as Dahlia so aptly reminds us. Forget that Palin got a passport only last year, or that she didn't even supervise garbage collection as a suburban mayor (her town of Wassila, Alaska, contracts it out). Instead what we're talking about are Palin's family dramas. Which many voters are probably reluctant to sit in judgment about, because on some level, who doesn't feel for the mother with the Down Syndrome fetus or the wayward teenage daughter?
I have to hope, though, that the other base Palin has been deployed to bring on home to the GOP ticket—independent and Democratic women who supported Hillary—will talk and ogle with the rest of us, and then remember that John McCain's running mate's daughter's pregnancy has absolutely nothing to do with what years eight through 12 of a Republican White House would be like. Talk about turning an election into a cotton-candy-fest of celebrity. Let's mine this vein, yes, and then move back to the big looming issues—economic, national, global—that will affect many more people than Palin and her family. Anne, I don't think the feminists who argued that family life is the stuff of "real" politics would want it otherwise.
-
sponsorship
Isn't there an irony here? All of that stuff being discussed with such energy today, most of which must look to the Republican campaign like dirty laundry—teenage pregnancy, flights in late pregnancy, decisions about abortion, child-raising—is the sort of material that, once upon a time, feminists described as "real" politics, of far greater importance than the tedious bourgeois political debate. And now it really is, suddenly, "real" politics, thanks to an evangelical conservative woman who brought all of it into the very center of the bourgeois political debate.
-
sponsorship
This whole weekend has felt like a marathon of Lifetime television. All anyone wants to talk about all of a sudden is the intimate family choices of stressed-out working mothers. Every woman I know is consumed by Sarah Palin’s larger-than-life life: Was it irresponsible for her to continue on as governor, having given birth to a special needs baby? Was it reckless of her to accept a vice presidential tap on top of that? Should she really have been flying in the eighth month of her high-risk pregnancy? Is she doing the right thing by supporting her unmarried teenage daughter whose pregnancy she revealed a few hours ago? Should she have inserted herself into her sister’s messy marriage? Feminist or otherwise, everyone has an opinion on Sarah Palin’s life and family and choices. We’ve all been here before, in our own lives. It’s almost a palpable relief to be able to talk about all this stuff at cocktail parties.
This is the Pandora’s box John McCain opened up when he picked Palin as his running mate—a woman whose family life is vastly more interesting than her very brief political career. Is it sexist that everyone is judging Palin on the former rather than the latter? Yes. But I suspect that all this frenzied close-reading of Sarah Palin’s uterine life was unavoidable. What are the "mommy wars" if not broad female judgments about other women’s private decisions? The truth is, whether or not John McCain wanted to have that big, brutal public conversation about the reality of abstinence and teen pregnancy and contraception and teenage mothers without the means to support their children, Sarah Palin is pushing it all onto the front pages. I don’t think the GOP intended to have this conversation at all, and definitely not on these terms. McCain could easily have named a Margaret Thatcher type whose work/family balance wasn’t quite so riveting. But Palin reflects the reality of women’s lives in America. Come on in, John McCain. It’s messy in here, but we’ve been waiting decades to show you the place.
Read the rest of the XX Factor conversation about Bristol Palin's pregnancy.
-
sponsorship
st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) }
Yesterday the Internet was buzzing with the rumor that Palin was actually the grandmother of her 4-month-old baby, Trig. The allegation was that the baby was the child of her teenage daughter Bristol, and Palin faked a pregnancy to cover this up. How better to knock down the story that you're a grandmother and your daughter was knocked up than to reveal that you're about to be a grandmother and your daughter is knocked up (and that the girl plans to marry the father of the child)? One hopes Bristol Palin's pregnancy means fewer speeches at the Republican Convention about the value of abstinence-only education for our teenagers, but we'll probably just hear about the value of choosing life, as if giving birth before your high school graduation is better than making honor roll. Isn't this all becoming a little too much? I hope the governor and grandmother-to-be is not planning a combination inaugural and destination wedding in D.C.
-
sponsorship
The news that Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter is pregnant has me thinking about the nuttily mixed messages that Palin's selection (and the media presentation thereof) sends out to women. It's a cornucopia of paradox: Her candidacy is somehow supposed to be a glass-ceiling-shattering inspiration, even though she actively opposes feminist causes like equal pay and reproductive choice. Her bearing of a Down syndrome baby while governing a state makes her a praiseworthy mother figure -- but don't forget that she's also a tireless workaholic (more than one profile has noted with awe that she was back at work three days after the birth of Trig in April.) Now the pro-life, devoutly Christian (yet sexy!) supermom has a knocked-up teen daughter ... but since we've already established that keeping your baby no matter what is a badge of moral honor, this development may actually enhance Palin's standing with the evangelical base. Forget about left and right for a moment: If you're a young girl looking for a role model of a woman running for high office, how do you decode all of this?
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?