No Compassion for Pregnant Teenagers
Despite Sarah Palin’s statements of support for her unwed, pregnant teenaged daughter (what Republicans and conservatives usually describe as a “slut” until it happens to one of their own), her own record of support for unwed teenaged mothers is actually quite despicable.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, earlier this year used her line-item veto to slash funding for a state program benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live.
After the legislature passed a spending bill in April, Palin went through the measure reducing and eliminating funds for programs she opposed. Inking her initials on the legislation — “SP” — Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million. Covenant House is a mix of programs and shelters for troubled youths, including Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.
According to Passage House’s web site, its purpose is to provide “young mothers a place to live with their babies for up to eighteen months while they gain the necessary skills and resources to change their lives” and help teen moms “become productive, successful, independent adults who create and provide a stable environment for themselves and their families.”
Palin’s own daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant and has plans to wed.
Via atrios, who adds
Just think about this one for a moment. Palin is rabidly anti-choice, wanting it to be illegal in all cases except when the mother’s life is threatened. This is a program which provides housing for teen mothers “in need of a place to live,” presumably due to the fact that their parents and sperm donors are somewhat less than supportive. Despite this, these young women choose (that word!) to have their babies. And the program which might give them, and their newborns, a place to live is something Palin cuts the funding for.
As usual, Duncan nails it right out of the park. It is an established fact that the GOP and the social conservative neanderthals who make up their base have been hostile to unwed teenaged mothers as a matter of policy for decades, dating back to Reagan’s false portrayal of black women as welfare queens to the GOP’s welfare reform passed by Bill Clinton. Now that the unwed pregnant teenager is one of their own, everyone’s supposed to back off and play nice. How old was Chelsea Clinton when John McCain was making jokes about how ugly she was, and that Janet Reno was her father? Just a year older, if that, than Bristol Palin.
The fact is, Sarah Palin SHOULD be shamed for what she’s putting her daughter through AND for her hypocrisy. “Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family,” says Governor Palin, and that’s as it should be. Anyone who is pregnant, but especially a teenager, deserves and needs the support of the family. But that’s not what Palin thinks: like her GOP colleagues, her instinct is to attack and harm the weakest among us. And so, despite her pious and precious comments about “love and support”, when it comes to unwed, homeless, pregnant teens, Palin slashes what little resources they have. “Take that slut, and think about the consequences next time you’re tempted to do it with someone.”
If unwed pregnant mothers weren’t treated like pariahs in the eyes of gooper fundie schmucks, gooper fundie schmucks like Sarah Palin wouldn’t be cutting funding for places like Passage House. The whole GOP take on teenage pregnancy is shame and punishment: “Look what you did, slut. Now you get what you deserve. Oh and don’t ask ME for help: you brought this on yourself young lady.” For these same people to now to pretend “oh it’s no big deal, and besides it’s a private matter” just because it’s one of theirs is ludicrous, hypocritical, and offensive.
For that matter, the whole “privacy” issue is a joke coming from the Republicans and the conservatives. Between the two they have made personalized attacks, often against the very weakest opponents, standard operational procedure. Whether it was the GOP’s now admittedly pointless witch hunt after Clinton, which dragged Monica Lewinsky’s name through the mud, or Ann Coulter saying the widows of 9/11 are “enjoying their husbands’ deaths, or Michelle Malkin siccing her crazy readers after anti-war college students and personally stalking a family that received S-CHIP in an effort to demonize them, the GOP’s support for warrantless wiretapping, or their interference in Terri Schiavo’s death, an utterly private affair, the GOP, their candidates, their surrogates, and all of their supporters have no credibility and no platform from which to speak about “private matters” and “leaving people alone.”
So when I see Sarah Palin trotted out tonight, and when I see her surrogates and supporters saying “this is nobody’s business”, I am going to laugh. This group has thrust people’s personal private business into the public square again and again and again, for the sole purpose of partisan gain. Having been the movers and shakers in the politics of personal destruction, they have no right to expect anything less in return. They want special rights that they won’t afford to anyone else, which fits in with their general policies and platform of “everything for the rich, nothing for anyone else.”
The fact is, if Bristol Palin wasn’t the governor’s daughter, the GOP would kick her and her gestating baby to the curb faster than Sarah Palin can say “you get what you deserve, slut.” That’s the truth, and no mount of wailing, teeth-gnashing, denial, and fingerpointing by the GOP and the conservative baboons that make up their base can change that.
