The Palin Family Values: The Plot Thickens

A Tangled Web. There are now two lines of consideration on maternity questions in the Palin family. The first concerns the baby Trigg born in April with Downs Syndrome. The story was that Sarah Palin faked the pregnancy and childbirth and that the real mother of the baby was Pahlin's daughter Bristol Palin. Originating in a Daily Kos diary and promoted by Andrew Sullivan, the phony pregnancy story had not yet found it's way to the mainstream media when the McCain campaign countered by announcing a second big story.

It turned out that Bristol Palin, age 17, is now pregnant.

According to the McCain campaign, Bristol Palin is five months pregnant which would mean that she (most likely) could not have given birth to a child in April four months ago. That set off a fevered round of pronoucements from the McCain campaign and the Obama campaign, reports from Wassila, Alaska, and an enormous amount of blogging and internet commentary.

Nagging Questions. The McCain campaign wants the pregnancy story put to rest, the Obama campaign wants the pregnancy story put to rest, and Time magazine wants the story put to rest.

But I'm not so sure.

The "fake pregnancy" rumor appears to be untrue. Another Daily Kos diarist found a picture of Palin looking obviously pregnant as she was being interviewed on television.

My main question concerns the response to Bristol Palin's pregnancy. Aware that his mother gave birth to him at 18, Barack Obama wants people to drop the story. I understand that. My mother was pregnant with me when she was 18 as well.

But I think it's important to consider how conservative Republicans would have responded if a teenage Chelsea Clinton was pregnant "out of wedlock." Or one of Obama's daughters? Or if Bristol Palin's mother had been a Democrat.

Let's put it this way. Such an event would have provoked a deluge of moral commentary and snarkiness from the right.

Let's start with the snarkiness.

The snark would have started with comments about Chelsea Clinton's appearance. The right makes more jokes about Chelsea Clinton's looks as the left does about George Bush's IQ. John McCain once asked a GOP audience: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno."

If Chelsea Clinton had become pregnant when she was 16 during the 1996 election, conservative satirists would have had a field day. There would have been endless commentary about the father's taste in women, what it must have been like to have sex with a woman as bad looking as Chelsea Clinton, or how ugly the baby would have been.

Needless to say, Janet Reno would have made a reappearance.

And Republican politicians like John McCain would have loved it--and repeated it.

Would the right have treated Bristol Palin any better if Sarah Palin had been on the Democratic ticket? I don't think so.

If Chelsea Clinton had gotten pregnant at 16, is there any reason to think that the conservative commentatariat would not have hesitated for a second in portraying her pregnancy as a

Conservatives already view teen pregnancy as a symptom of liberalism's advocacy of relative values as opposed to the supposedly absolute values of conservatism. Here's Star Parker writing for the conservative blog Townhall.com.

Conservatives, as I stated above, are clear about this. Traditional values we learn from the Bible. We can simply point to the Ten Commandments. And liberal values? The absolute here is that there are no absolutes. Everything is relative, and the only absolute is to welcome and tolerate everything.

Starting from this position, conservatives would have condemned a Chelsea Clinton pregnancy as an example of the failure of both liberal values and liberal parenting on the part of the Clintons. The key is Parker's comment on the only liberal absolute being to "welcome and tolerate everything." Conservatives lament that pre-marital teen sex is no longer condemned like it was in the forties and fifties. They don't like the toleration of teen sex by parents and public opinion and they don't like the encouragement of teen sex that they see in television, movies, videos, and music.

In this context, writers on the right would have hammered hard at a Chelsea Clinton pregnancy for what it said about the liberalism of the Clinton family and the liberalism of American culture.
The same would have been the case with Bristol Palin if her mom had been a Democrat.

It's unfortunate that Bristol Palin is pregnant and it's also unfortunate that her pregnancy has become a matter of controversy during an election season.

But Bristol Palin is lucky that her mom's a Republican.

Otherwise, the right-wing would have made her pregnancy a symbol of everything that was wrong with the Democrats, liberalism, and America.