BlogWonks

Note: This column is probably going to make all of my friends mad at me again. I’m sorry about that, but someone needs to say these things.

At least I’ve learned something from McCain’s choice of running mate. Mainly that I didn’t know my party as well as I thought I did. First they nominated McCain, a known immigration-amnesty RINO. Then when I expressed what I expected to be widespread reservations about her, my fellow Republicans were mystified. Am I implying that there’s something wrong with latchkey kids and out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancies? What problem could anyone possibly have with such things?

Had you asked me a week ago, I would have been certain that Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter would not have condoned a mother who spent so little time with her daughter that the daughter became pregnant at 17. I was wrong. Only Dr. Laura has expressed any reservations.

Sure, a stay-at-home dad is better than no stay-at-home parent. Of course, one would expect alleged conservatives to realize that men and women, including fathers and mothers, are not interchangeable. One person has already called me “sexist” for saying this, in a manner which suggested she expected the word to affect me the way “Rumplestiltskin” affected a certain gold-spinning dwarf. Well, guess what? Reality is sexist! Nature is sexist! Nature does not give a hoot that in the 20^th century parents decided they had better things to do than take care of their children.. No amount of social engineering is going to change this. It hasn’t changed it and it isn’t going to. It might be sexist that children need to be taken care of, but it is also true.

But a full-time dad is better than leaving the kids on their own. If Mr. Palin really is going to stay home; the articles I’ve read conflict, some saying that after Trig was born, he changed his mind about it and announced that he was going to keep on working. If he is quitting, I’d say it came about 16 years too late for Bristol, wouldn’t you? Well, if you’re like most Republicans, no, you probably wouldn’t.

I have also been informed, incredibly, that an unmarried 17-year-old getting pregnant is not evidence of neglectful parents. Never mind that teenagers who are supervised and whose parents took the trouble *and time* to form a strong relationship with them don’t get pregnant. When teenage girls have sex, it’s nearly always because they’re not getting enough attention at home and turn to a boy for it instead. But Republicans don’t seem to have a problem with this. I can only conclude that most Republicans would have no objection to their unmarried teenage daughters getting pregnant. Certainly a vote for McCain/Palin will send their daughters this message loud and clear.

The most surreal response was when someone told me that his great-grandparents got married at 15 and 14, therefore Bristol Palin having a shotgun wedding at 17 is cool. That her parents were too busy to supervise Bristol or form a strong enough relationship with her that she didn’t get pregnant before she’s old enough to vote is apparently not a problem. Also, apparently teen weddings a century ago, when divorce was difficult to get and social support for marriage was strong, are no more likely to succeed than those of today, when getting a divorce is easier than renting a car and society at large urges people to do so the first time there’s the slightest problem.

Things have changed a bit since the days of our great-grandparents. My high school boyfriend’s parents were married at 17. (Had he been conceived three years later, they would just have killed him before he was born.) His mother ran off when he was so young that he has only one memory of her. He spent his childhood being shuttled between his father and stepmother du jour (the last I heard, the man was on his fourth wife) and his grandmother. My old boyfriend is manic-depressive, was unable to go to college despite a genius-level IQ because his family had no money and he was just barely ineligible for a college scholarship due to a couple of low grades caused by chronic depression, and is on his second wife so far. As we can see, there was no reason whatsoever for his parents not to get pregnant at 17, and not to give him up for adoption when they did. He did just fine with a father who was only around for about a fourth of his childhood and almost none of his adolescence and a series of stepmothers. If by “fine” you mean “has never been to prison”.

Do people not realize that in this era of high pressure to divorce, a teen marriage is unlikely to survive? And so Bristol’s child or children will have to go through their parents’ divorce, when she could have let a pair of grownups with a stable marriage adopt the child?

Sarah Palin couldn’t do a decent job of raising five kids.Why do we think she can run a country?

And am I the only one who sees a problem with letting yourself get knocked up when you’re too old to have a healthy baby? I’m 38 and childless. It hurts me deeply that it’s too late for me to have children – doing so would be too risky for them at my age – but it’s the responsible thing to do. But some people don’t see any reason not to inflict birth defects on an innocent child by having unprotected heterosexual intercourse late in life.

When I point all this out, as usual, people ignore that I am talking about a woman with a gainfully employed husband, who is pursuing a high-profile career to feed her own ego, and apply what I’m saying to extreme cases. What about a mother whose husband died, they say. What about a family where the father, despite his best efforts, just can’t make enough money to pay the bills. But let me explain something to you: most adults firmly believe that children are morons, but in fact, children perfectly comprehend the difference between “I’d love to stay home and take care of you, dear, but we won’t be able to buy groceries if I do,” and “You brats are just going to have to rough it, my glory in the working world is more important to me than you are.” Children who come home to an empty house because there’s no other way for their parents to pay the rent have dramatically fewer behavior problems than children who come home to an empty house because their mother is addicted to her own self-glorification. Really. You can look it up.

I thought we were the family values party. There’s more to family values than not murdering your infants in the womb. Feminists have been laboring feverishly to cover up this basic and universally known fact of life for forty years now, but the stubborn fact is that children need to be taken care of. No, a six-year-old cannot prepare her own meals, assuming her parents don’t want her to grow up with diabetes, hypoglycemia, tooth decay, and the host of other diet-induced health problems which have become widespread in the decades since mothers decided they had more important things to do than feed their children. Nowadays children who have not yet reached puberty are routinely developing diet-related health problems that used to come on in middle age. Still, let the six-year-old feed herself; I’m sure she’s responsible and knowledgeable enough to give herself a good nutrtional balance. At that age, left to my own devices, I would have lived on Koogle sandwiches, Koogle being a now-defunct brand of chocolate-flavored peanut butter; it would have been basically Reese’s cups on white bread. But everyone else is so sanguine about this that Willow Palin must somehow have better nutritional judgment than most six-year-olds.

Study after study has demonstrated that children who are securely emotionally attached to their mothers – which generally means that their mothers have to spend more time with them than a 40-hour-a-week job with four hours of commuting each day leaves – have an advantage that lasts all of their lives; they earn more, are physically healthier, and have more successful relationships. 75% of violent criminals come from fatherless homes, as do the majority of substance abusers and welfare recipients. The facts are overwhelming: children need their parents, no matter how many lies feminists tell about this.

Since I was born in 1970, when women were freshly freed from the horrific drudgery of taking care of their children, I have met almost no one my age or younger who did not come from a broken or two-career home. My classmates and later on my dates didn’t have a mother at home to teach them about affection and make them feel emotionally secure; they often didn’t have a father except for two months out of the year to discipline them; a majority were reeling from the traumas of watching their parents split up. This meant that I was sentenced to spend my formative years locked up with children who no one had ever attempted to civilize, and when I was older to try to form relationships with people my age whose parents had barely had relationships with them. The level of cluelessness such people grow up with has to be seen to be believed. I had one friend whose mother didn’t consider five children a reason not to work full-time as soon as each child was home from the hospital and whose father didn’t see any reason not to spend more time with a parade of girlfriends than with his kids. The result was that she thought that disagreeing about the merits of a movie was a perfectly adequate reason to end a years-long friendship. She also did the LUG (Lesbian Until Graduation) thing in college before marrying a child-man with hair longer than hers.

Before Women’s Lib, women played an important part in society. They conveyed the values of their society to their children, civilized the little naked apes, watched over their health (read: cooked rather than leaving their children’s nutrition in the hands of Ronald McDonald), and made it possible for them to grow up into healthy, productive members of society with a shot at their own happiness. Now that they are “freed” from this, there are twenty or thirty women who get to be doctors or governor of Alaska, and millions who spend their days running a cash register or doing data entry and answering the phone instead of giving their children the love and care they need. Television pretends that workplaces are crammed with high-powered female executives and lawyers and homicide detectives, but the reality is that only a tiny percentage of women have entered such high-status professions. According to the Department of Labor, about 95% of working women in real life are secretaries and cashiers. If you believe that either of those professions is more fulfilling than motherhood, you have severe brain damage. By denigrating motherhood, feminism has cheated the majority of women out of the chance of doing something important in society, and being the center of someone’s universe, and doing a job for which they in all the world are uniquely qualified, in favor of wasting their lives at dead-end jobs that anyone else could do just as well as they could.

So now Republicans have effectively announced that there is nothing wrong with having children who you can’t be bothered to raise, teenage sex, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and marriages all but guaranteed to end in divorces which will traumatize the couple and their children. I had been slightly optimistic that people were beginning to come to their senses about the importance of real families, but now that alleged “conservatives” are condoning the most irresponsible treatment of children, I’m looking at one more generation at least of lonely delinquent children who will grow up to be lonely dysfunctional adults with piles of health problems. Also the high crime rate that goes hand in hand with broken homes.

I had almost resigned myself to voting for McCain. Then he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. So now I’m giving my vote to the Libertarians for the first time since I was old enough to drink.

Unless about 60 million previously unsuspected Libertarian voters show up from somewhere, no matter which way the next election goes, America is screwed.