When Bristolgate broke, my friends and I immediately started running email victory laps.
No longer would the GOP be, as my friend Colin had written, "falling all over themselves to light Sarah Palin's cigarette." We were positive that while McCain was busy pimping his wife at a topless beauty pageant, and his staff was distracted with counting his houses, somehow they'd wound up tapping this Red State huntress without vetting anything but her gender. And now, post-announcement, they were learning about Palin's seventeen-year-old daughter's pregnancy right along with us, the public, in glorious real time. This, we grinned, was not going to play in Peoria.
promotion
But the more I saw the right wing's reaction to the pregnancy news, the more I realized that of course Palin had been vetted. Vetted like a hunting party vets a bull moose, premarital pregnancy and all. With the aim of mesmerizing and wooing the GOP's Christian conservative base, McCain chose Palin very much on purpose. I'm not talking about Sarah Palin. I'm talking about her daughter, Bristol.
Ever since the news broke, the Christian right has been defending — nay, championing — the fruitful-and-multiplying Palins, including the unwed teenage one. As the AP reported, "Prominent religious conservatives, many of whom have been lukewarm toward McCain's candidacy, predicted that the announcement [that Bristol was pregnant] would not diminish conservative Christian enthusiasm for the vice presidential hopeful, a staunch abortion opponent. In fact, there was talk that it might help."
A narrative in which a wayward girl gets married without needing to sleep around first.
"Help" by serving as tangible evidence of Sarah Palin's anti-choice politics? That's the standard explanation, but it doesn't entirely make sense. Her anti-choice credentials — opposing abortion even in cases of rape or incest — are well-established. She hardly needed to prove her position with a teen pregnancy carried to term. So what does young Bristol Palin really represent to the Religious Right?
A narrative in which a wayward girl gets married to her high-school sweetheart without needing to sleep around first. It's a story that's completely consistent with the evangelicals' pet plotline: delivery from depraved, godless 2008, and a return to 1958 — an allegedly simpler time when aluminum cans were introduced as food storage, The Danny Thomas Show topped the TV ratings, and most crucially, a time when women married their sweethearts and started their families while still very young, before they could enter that dangerous twentysomething period of sexual experimentation.
Despite all the brouhaha about teenage pregnancies today, Bristol's situation more closely resembles the '50s, when both pregnancy rates and marriage rates were higher than they are today. In the '50s, Americans were marrying younger than they had in generations, and many of those marriages were of the shotgun variety. By 1959, nearly half of all brides were younger than nineteen. In 1960, the percentage of unmarried teen births was 15%, compared to 75% today — not because girls weren't getting pregnant, but because they were getting pregnant and married. (Those who dared not marry their baby daddies disappeared for nine months, or faced "abortion committees.")
