Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin announced Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. The girl is a senior in high school, although some reports say she's dropped out of school because of the pregnancy. My daughter is a freshman in high school and very much still in school. When I asked my daughter about Palin's daughter, she knew more about the situation than I did.

Did you catch that? I'm following this story closely, but my daughter is following it more closely. It seems to resonate with her life and concerns.

Here's what resonates with my life and concerns: Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy is not OK.

It's not OK for a public figure to arrive on the national scene from out of nowhere and immediately distinguish herself by announcing that her unmarried, high-school daughter is five-months pregnant and will thus "grow up faster than [her parents] had ever planned." It's not OK to smooth it over by saying the girl will marry the 18-year-old father (who wrote on his MySpace page that he doesn't want children). It's not OK to paper it over by claiming it's a private matter, and the parents support their daughter. And it's especially not OK to glamorize it by whisking the father (who is never referred to as the girl's fiancé) down from Alaska to stand on the stage at the Republican National Convention next to the girl he knocked up.

It's not a private matter.

Sarah Palin aspires to be the Vice President of the United States. She's a public figure and a role model. One who holds political views that immediately caused the Republican presidential ticket, of which she is now a part, to receive accolades of endorsement from Christianist organizations, which had withheld their support for the McCain nomination until Palin appeared. Christianists vetted Palin because she supports "values" that social conservatives have shoved down our throats for twenty years.

You want values? You want family? You want personal and moral responsibility? Show me the discussion of Palin's daughter having made bad choices. Show me the acknowledgment that the girl experienced what every adult and every soon-to-be adult has ever experienced, and – although we sympathize with the girl – we know she chose wrongly. We understand how it happened, but the choices the Palin girl made are not the ones we want our children to think are in any sense OK.

The issue is not whether the Palin girl decides – or doesn't decide – to terminate the pregnancy or marry the father. Those things are secondary and barely relevant to the discussion of teen sexuality. The issue is the Palin girl is pregnant. She shouldn't be; and the girl's mother promotes policies that oppose sex education, birth control, reproductive rights, and support for unwed mothers.

But enough about the disturbing national politics. How do we talk with our children about Palin and her pregnant daughter? Not having any great ideas about the answer to that question, I called up someone who I thought would.

Charles's daughter is a year older than mine. And having talked with him over the years, I've decided he's got a better handle on how to discuss difficult topics with his children than anyone else I know. I called him up and said, 'Charles, here we have this woman who's running for Vice President, who announces she's got a pregnant high-school daughter, and I don't know what I'm supposed to say to my own daughter about that.'

Of course he laughed... And he said that you (I) have to have a discussion with her about birth control. Which, he said, you can talk about by asking questions like whether she wants to go see the doctor for a prescription. That's not an easy conversation, he said, but you have it because you care about your daughter, and the alternative is worse.


Parenting ― 3D's take on Sarah Palin ― Election 2008