It’s Perverse Only If You Do It Right

Sarah Palin’s daughter can have as many babies as she likes, wed, unwed, or between hubbies. I don’t care and would be happy to be spared the details.

I’ve said as much regarding John Edwards, too; my interest in other people’s sex lives exists in only trace amounts, hardly detectable to the human eye. If any part were to interest me, it would be the sex itself—so long as it’s hot, sweaty, and nasty—so no thank you on the exclusive ultrasounds of little Baby Palin Johnston.

But, look here, this is what I ask: Palin needs not to breathe word one … ever … in eternity … about abstinence-only education. Governor, you no longer have a right to your old opinion on the subject, and if events haven’t taught you to change your mind, then please just shut up about it.

Another thing. Can the religious right pipe down about how the real story here is about the sanctity of life? Admittedly, as a “poster child of the pro-life movement,” this fetus is many steps up from the bloody lump in a garbage can the movement has been schlepping around for three decades now. Still, the hypocrisy is mind-numbing—and I’ve seen my share of hypocrisy, with only minimal numbing effects.

If the pious prudes were serious when they fretted over the negative message Murphy Brown teaches to young people, then for heaven’s sake don’t put this girl on a pedestal and pretend she’s some kind of faith-based miracle. The sanctity of life, God’s precious gift, is affordable to girls everywhere who spread their knees without benefit (or knowledge) of safe birth control.

And last. Yes, following the family’s press announcement, some responses to Palin’s private family predicament have been inappropriate and excessive. But let’s not pretend that, if one of Obama’s daughters got knocked up, the rightwing responses would have been any more measured and polite.

Just take two or three deep breaths now. Think: Sex is OK. It’s all right for our kids to think it’s OK. Sure, they need to learn responsibility—about money, voting, and calorie intake—and, yes, sex, too. Babies are a fine thing too, taken on a one by one basis.

The problem is not sex, people. It’s thinking you or your representatives in government have the right to stick a nose into other people’s private business. It’s whining about the choices other people make and seriously questioning their right to make those choices, and , then, when you make a bad decision yourself, pretending that your shit don’t stink.