Sarah Palin, Pt 2

 Lot of discussion about this at work, but I think at this point we need to stay off it.

 Obama has called to leave the families and kids out of it, which agree with.

 And I think the guy at MSNBC.com's Sexploration (Brian Alexander) said pretty much what I think about the subject, so I link to it here:

 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26501011/
 
 This is the best part of the article, and the part that made me sit up and go, "Thank you!"

War in Iraq, economy imploding, energy transformation finally on America’s agenda, income disparity threatening the social order, cynicism infecting every corner of American life, a tectonic shift to a multi-polar world, a collapsing educational system, and you want to make the pregnancy of a 17-year-old a political issue?

Stop it. Unmarried 17-year-old girls get pregnant every day in this country — too many of them — and they come from strong, healthy families, and broken, dysfunctional families, and conservative families and liberal families. Bristol’s pregnancy says nothing about Sarah Palin’s suitability to be the next vice-president just as Obama’s youthful cocaine use, or his middle name, says nothing about his suitability to be the next president.

But this country is stuck in junior high when it comes to sex. We either want to condemn it and say it shouldn’t be discussed in any realistic way, or we want to drench ourselves in it.

So we hear all about Palin’s hotness quotient or her local beauty queen victory, all of which is about as relevant as the fact that she has hunted moose. (I’ve spent some time in Alaska, fell in love with my wife in Alaska, and hung out with a lot of Alaskans and can tell you that hunting moose is to Alaskans what lunching at Barney’s wine bar is to New Yorkers. No big deal.)

If we want to talk about sex and politics, how about talking about whether or not the candidates defend comprehensive sex education, or favor abstinence-only sex education? Data has debunked the abstinence-only approach as wishful thinking. Texas, for example, which strongly endorses abstinence-only, and demands parental consent before teenagers can get contraception, leads the nation in its rate of teen pregnancies, dropping only by 19 percent from 1991 to 2004 while the rest of country dropped by over 30 percent .

Meanwhile in California, where comprehensive sex-education is mandatory in public schools, the teen pregnancy rate dropped by 47 percent. 

That’s what matters. It is none of my business that Bristol Palin is pregnant or what sexual prescriptions Sarah Palin chooses in her own household. It is my business what prescriptions McCain-Palin and Obama-Biden want to give me.

 You see, they are making a choice.  I would like to see that their choice is one of many options that remains open to women, so again - I'm not voting for McCain/Palin.

 But I think being a seventeen year old and pregnant is hard enough, so how about we get off this story and onto something else... like Sarah Palin's stand on the issues.

 DV