is it boring to make this observation?
so after i found myself making drunken "sarah palin's daughter is a slut" jokes last night, i got to thinking:
so hey, wait a second, i think that (conscientious, safe, sane and intentional) sluthood is pretty awesome. and that grls and wimmin of all ages and descriptions should have full control over their bodies. so most of the hilarity from the fact that sarah palin's daughter might have a kid before she can vote for her mom for vice president comes from the hypocrisy, right?
only check it, i don't think there is any hypocrisy. in the most recent issue of TIME, bill o'reilly answers a question about the way he talked shit on jamie lynn spears when she got pregnant, to the effect of "does bristol palin make you reconsider talking that shit?"
and his response is "no, my comment was on the parents, and how they were clearly not supervising their daughter. i don't think there's any evidence that sarah palin wasn't supervising her daughter"
so aside from being a bullshit arbitrary distinction, let's pick that apart a little, shall we?
we know that the spears family is a den of moral squalor and base urges... because we just do.
we know that the palin family is no such den. not because they're from the frigid north, not because they're secessionists, but because she supports abstinence-only education and hates abortion.
THIS IS ACTUALLY NOT A CONTRADICTION. IT MAKES SENSE.
first off we have o'reilly announcing (along with a lot of other people) that this is different because sarah palin was supervising her 17 year old daughter in her path to pregnancy. not that she was faced with a tough and unforseen decision, through which she stuck to her fundamentalist moral guns, but that she knew what was going on, and approved.
and so this doesn't mean that Abstinence Only Education, as advocated by sarah palin, doesn't work, it means that it succeeds in doing what it is intended to do.
which is not preventing teen sex, but creating an ironclad bond between teen sex and teen pregnancy and lifelong irrevocable consequences. and about keeping minors from knowing how to stay safe and how not to have babies, and how to make sex amazing and life-affirming.
the goal of abstinence only education is to lock young people capable of bearing children into doing just that, and having that be the defining factor of their lives starting when they first become capable of carrying a pregnancy to term. then people whose mothers, say, are the governors of the Great White North, or who otherwise have access to enormous resources and privilege, can churn out all the babies they want, and maybe have time to have a career in between pregnancies, when they hand the bundles of joy off to the domestic help.
and then everybody else, who maybe don't have much background of Great White Anything, or elected office or nepotism or vast trust funds, or whatev.... they still get stuck popping out a bunch of babies, but they don't have the resources to support them, and they don't have the opportunity to have a career beyond the subsitence level... and once their kids all get seized by child protective services or the prison system, these women are freed up to be the domestic help for those other people...
that's the way it's sposed to work, i think.
success!
so hey, wait a second, i think that (conscientious, safe, sane and intentional) sluthood is pretty awesome. and that grls and wimmin of all ages and descriptions should have full control over their bodies. so most of the hilarity from the fact that sarah palin's daughter might have a kid before she can vote for her mom for vice president comes from the hypocrisy, right?
only check it, i don't think there is any hypocrisy. in the most recent issue of TIME, bill o'reilly answers a question about the way he talked shit on jamie lynn spears when she got pregnant, to the effect of "does bristol palin make you reconsider talking that shit?"
and his response is "no, my comment was on the parents, and how they were clearly not supervising their daughter. i don't think there's any evidence that sarah palin wasn't supervising her daughter"
so aside from being a bullshit arbitrary distinction, let's pick that apart a little, shall we?
we know that the spears family is a den of moral squalor and base urges... because we just do.
we know that the palin family is no such den. not because they're from the frigid north, not because they're secessionists, but because she supports abstinence-only education and hates abortion.
THIS IS ACTUALLY NOT A CONTRADICTION. IT MAKES SENSE.
first off we have o'reilly announcing (along with a lot of other people) that this is different because sarah palin was supervising her 17 year old daughter in her path to pregnancy. not that she was faced with a tough and unforseen decision, through which she stuck to her fundamentalist moral guns, but that she knew what was going on, and approved.
and so this doesn't mean that Abstinence Only Education, as advocated by sarah palin, doesn't work, it means that it succeeds in doing what it is intended to do.
which is not preventing teen sex, but creating an ironclad bond between teen sex and teen pregnancy and lifelong irrevocable consequences. and about keeping minors from knowing how to stay safe and how not to have babies, and how to make sex amazing and life-affirming.
the goal of abstinence only education is to lock young people capable of bearing children into doing just that, and having that be the defining factor of their lives starting when they first become capable of carrying a pregnancy to term. then people whose mothers, say, are the governors of the Great White North, or who otherwise have access to enormous resources and privilege, can churn out all the babies they want, and maybe have time to have a career in between pregnancies, when they hand the bundles of joy off to the domestic help.
and then everybody else, who maybe don't have much background of Great White Anything, or elected office or nepotism or vast trust funds, or whatev.... they still get stuck popping out a bunch of babies, but they don't have the resources to support them, and they don't have the opportunity to have a career beyond the subsitence level... and once their kids all get seized by child protective services or the prison system, these women are freed up to be the domestic help for those other people...
that's the way it's sposed to work, i think.
success!