So, Bristol Palin's first child was born yesterday. The news reports are thick with information. The first name is Tripp (what an unfortunate name for a boy, he will be tripped a lot in school) and the last name is Johnston, after the father. Now my first thought was, oh, they got married then? Actually, no. Bristol and Levi are still not married. They still plan to get married, according to various articles I reviewed this afternoon.
I am surprised. I thought fundamentalist christians got all goofy about virginity before marriage and about legitimacy of children. You know, the whole shotgun marriage thing. Apparently none of that is part of the "family values" routine today. Nor is anyone concerned about divorce. The "family values" issues are down to banning abortions, preventing teenagers from getting contraception, and freaking out about gay people.
The amazing thing is that fundamentalists and conservative christians simply refuse to admit that they are actively participating in dramatic social changes about the meaning of family and marriage. Fifty years ago, the idea that we would praise a 17-year-old girl for becoming an unwed mother - rather than have an abortion or give the child up for adoption would be a shocker. The idea of waiting until after the child is born for a wedding (why, so she can fit into a nice dress?) would also have been unthinkable then. And nobody would have paraded young Levi and his pregnant Bristol around holding hands until they were married. Instead, they were being offered up as examples for youth today, presumably because they were not having an abortion. This is why the GOP's claims about family and tradition are going nowhere today.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Sarah Palin's Grandson is Born; No Wise Men to be Seen
Posted by The Law Talking Guy at 5:45 PM
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Oh but LTG, I'm sure you're just being cynical, or maybe don't understand what the fundamentalists believe here, I mean, the GOP are all about protecting the tradition of marriage after all, and when you're a VP hopeful's daughter, *planning* to get married is as good as married really, I mean it's not like she did anything really bad like have sex before marriage or... Oh. Yeah, there was that wasn't there? ;-p
(yes, I agree with you, and am also intrigued at how anti-environment a lot of fundies are, possibly inadvertently, with their obsession with breeding well past the capacity of this poor li'l planet of ours)
Right, I'm off to find an anti-gay marriage "we just want to protect marriage" person to bait about whether they support anti-divorce legislation...
ps Tripp?! What the?! S'pose it could be worse, just not sure how.
Well, you know something is up in the Republican Party when the VP's gay daughter gets pregnant and has a baby and no one says boo about it.
It's the classic double standard. When a white girl from Alaska gets knocked up, out of marriage, that's one thing. Poor little thing let her passions run away with her.
When its a black girl from inner city Chicago, she's a slut deserving of her poverty. It's God's justice.
I swear, can't we be like the French in at least one way? Can't we just grow up?
She's gay? Huh? So it's ok for her to be pregnant because it proves that she's not really gay or something? I thought she'd been with Levi (he with the arrested in relation to drugs offences mommy) for three years now, and was happily straight?
Anyway. French style maturity and obliteration of double standards? Sounds good to me, as long as we can have the mature cheeses as well as the mature attitude.
Vaguely related, there's a study reported in the Age, here, talking about sexual behaviour of teenagers with / without abstinence pledges, the only real difference seeming to be that those aiming for abstinence don't use contraception (probably because they don't know about it).
Personally, I'm all for kids having full and frank sexual education, including all the details on birth control, STDs, and pregnancy - it's one area where there's no such thing as too much information. And if you happen to have a daughter and you're really worried about it all, just tell her, often and from a young age, all about what a massive baby she was - trust me when I say the idea of giving birth to a 10lb8 monster makes you *very* careful.
Pombat: USWest was referring to the daughter of the current Republican VP. Mary Cheney is a lesbian.
I'm not surprised that you didn't know, Pombat, that Mary Cheney (VP Dick Cheney's daughter) is a lesbian with a child in a committed relationship. Democrats have failed to push that issue successfully. They get accused by the GOP of messing with a man's family, rather than calling out the bastard for his hypocrisy.
Bet you anything she voted for Obama.
Ah yes, I did know Mary Cheney was gay (thank you Jon Stewart), didn't realise she was pregnant/has a kid though (yay for her). Sorry, was clearly just being a bit dense yesterday, with Mary / Bristol confusion.
It is interesting how flexible the GOP are with the "here's my great family, aren't they just the perfect ad" / "stop asking questions about my family, and leave them alone in private" viewpoints. Although to be fair, politicians of all stripes flip like that, but the GOP seem to have the more obviously hypocritical ones, like pregnant gay daughters...
Tripp. To be honest, that's one of the more normal sounding names that family has come up with lately.
It still amazes me that it's now okay in conservative circles to put off a marriage until after a child is born so that the bride can have a perfect princess party. When did that happen? The idea that illegitimacy is not shameful is really a massive shift in our notions of marriage as a society. So these conservatives who rail about traditional marriage have already forgotten half of what it meant. Even more, if you think about the end of coverture (the legal occluding of a wife's personhood behind the husband's), the easy availability of divorce, then the creation of no-fault divorce.
My point in sum: A 21st century straight marriage has much, much more in common with a 21st century gay marriage than it does with an 18th century marriage. Even for conservatives!
Tell me about it! Something is happening LTG! I have people pushing me on the child issue and my boyfriend and I aren't even engaged. First is was my French host dad. "you don't have to be married to have kid." But he's French. They turned to corner on that a long time ago. Women have so many social supports there they can afford a kid without the husband.
But even my grandfather, old and traditional, started in on the same theme. What??????? Even I'm not that socially liberal!
It certainly strikes me as a strange decision to be in a relationship that could legally and practically lead to marriage, but decide to have a child within that relationship in advance of seeing if that road to marriage is open. I mean, a kid is more of a commitment than a marriage. Maybe people don't quite understand that?
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