I come to praise Sarah Palin, not to bury her.
As part of her post-election media tour, Governor Palin appeared on CNN's Larry "Older Than Moses" King Show. When asked about her pregnant teenage daughter Bristol, Palin had this to say:
"You know, I looked at her and thought---and I thought, Bristol, honey, you're going to have to grow up really fast...She's going to make a great mom. And she---she is very strong. She's going to be just fine.
But Bristol has an opportunity at this point also to reach out to other young American women and let them know that these are absolutely less than ideal circumstances that she or any other unwed teenage mother are in. And it is not something to glamorize. It's not something to condone, if you will. Bristol has an opportunity to reach out to other young mothers and help them and, hopefully, not see such a prevalence, also, of unwed teenage mothers. The rates are too high."
Although we all might quibble with the exact language the Governor used --- and I'm sure most of us wish she had made this sort of statement earlier in the Campaign (see this op-ed from our friend Saul Hoffman) --- nonetheless, this strikes me as a strong and important statement from a leading R.
This is as good a time as any to note two other instances that Sarah Palin--generally regarded as a champion of social conservatives---has talked about the power of prevention; not generally a topic embraced by social conservatives.
When asked by People magazine about her daughter's pregnancy and how it might have changed they way Palin talks to her children about sex, the Governor had this to say:
"I've always been a proponent of making sure kids understand---even in schools--they'd better take preventative measures so they don't find themselves in these less than ideal circumstances."
When asked if that meant abstinence or contraception, Palin replied:
"Well, both. Ideally abstinence. But we have not been ones to say that students should not know what preventive measures are all about."
And this from a September exchange with ABC's Charles Gibson:
"I am pro-life. I do respect other people's opinion on this...What I want to do when elected vice president, with John McCain, hopefully, be able to reach out and work with those who are on the other side of this issue, because I know that we can all agree on the need for and the desire for frewer abortions in America..."
Call me caught up in the political optimisim that always grips Washington before a new President takes office, but taken together, these statements from Sarah Palin are quite positive. When a leading light of the social conservative movement talks about the importance of teaching abstinence and contraception in schools, talks about the importance of abortion opponents finding common ground with pro-choice advocates, and when she uses her bully pulpit to talk about the importance of preventing teen pregnancy, color me impressed.
At least for now.
"A leading light of the social conservative movement?" I don't think so. Nor do most conservatives I know.
For anyone in the conservative movement to bring up prevention measures as a possibility is a good thing. But her quote,"We have not been ones to say that students should not know what preventive measures are all about" is so broad as to be, in my opinion, meaningless. It could very well mean that schools should teach how unreliable contraception is - which, as you know, some schools already teach.
Unfortunately People magazine didn't probe her on this.