Sep 02 2008
Make up your minds: When is a woman an adult?
I was reading about Palinsanity - a term coined by Althouse to describe the vicious attacks on Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain’s pick for vice-president. The Anchoress (see my blogroll) has a good round-up of stories and opinion.
Personally, I went from flabberghasted to incensed in less than a day. Yesterday I read the sick rumors that Gov. Palin’s youngest child was secretly her grandson (some people need to lay off the romance novels). Now that the Palin family has revealed their oldest daughter is pregnant - and therefore can’t be her brother’s mother - the pundits and opinionated cranks have a whole new bag. The gist of these comments seems to be that 1) because the youngest child has Down’s Syndrome, the Gov. needs to go home and be a mother; and 2) because the 17-year-old is pregnant and preparing to marry the father of the baby, the Gov. needs to go home and be a grandmother.
Oh, irony!
This weekend I enjoyed visiting with my niece and her husband. They are happy about moving into their first home and are expecting their first child. And they’re 19. Are they children? No.
Today after school, I ran into a former student who was married this spring. She’s expecting her first child this coming winter. She’s 16 and her husband is 24. Are they children? Heck, no!
The irony is that if Gov. Palin’s daughter had chosen to abort the baby, our society would consider her grown-up enough to make that choice. She needn’t have consulted with her mother, either. A 17-year-old is considered old enough to have sex and deal with the consequences on her own. Parental consent laws are debated endlessly as a controversial limits on “choice”, aren’t they?
But when it comes to politics, suddenly the lip-service feminists (including the men) have become reactionaries who know that the governor’s ovaries dictate that she must step down.
I’ve noticed that too, and it makes steam come out of my ears. I’m on Facebook, and some of my acquaintances that are hard-core liberals and hard-core Obama supporters have been saying some truly mind-blowing things about Gov. Palin. Apparently women should only have choices if they’re Democrats.
I first saw this kind of thinking when I was in college, but made the charitable assumption that it was because we were all young and inexperienced in the real world. I remember in particular a budding feminist who said that her mother *couldn’t* go to college in the ’50s because no women did except for MRS degrees. I pointed out that my mother went to college and got a mathematics degree - but not a husband. She was taken aback and then tried the “your mom’s family must have been rich” tact until I disabused her of that notion.
But this Palinsanity gets me because the bashers have embraced a “women belong home” rhetoric that I’ve seldom ever heard from reactionary Bible-slappers!** It’s like the idiot boys who find out their girlfriends are pregnant and say “I’m not paying child support. It was her CHOICE to have the baby” as if abortion is the only rational choice to pregnancy.
**”Reactionary Bible-slapper” is a man who tells me I should stay home and raise my children while my husband provides for us. He quotes Scripture before I can get a word in edgewise. Before he can smugly walk away, I inform him I have neither children nor a husband. He’s dumbfounded for 3 seconds then starts to peg me as a radical feminist. I express my interest in being married but want to be “equally yoked” as indicated in Second Corinthians 6:14-15.
If his head doesn’t implode or he isn’t at a loss for words at that point, I slip in that I’m Catholic. Then the real fun begins.