I'd like to think that most mothers wouldn't leap at the chance to sacrifice their 17-year-old pregnant daughter's right to privacy on the altar of their own political ambitions. But that's exactly what Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has done.
Is that what political partisans mean when they carry on about so-called "family values"?
To me, one of the most disturbing parts of the Palin family melodrama unfolding on the national stage this week is this: Bristol Palin's pregnancy should never have been a matter of public debate.
So it shouldn't be discussed by the gas bags on MSNBC and Fox News, or their counterparts yammering away on political blogs and radio talk shows. She shouldn't have been allowed to become a punch line for comedians.
The public at large shouldn't have had the chance to speculate in any way about this teenager's life.
Parents are supposed to protect their children rather than exploit them for their own purposes.
When a high school student gets pregnant, the first question that crosses our minds shouldn't be what presidential candidate John McCain knew and when he knew it.
His campaign has insisted he was aware about Bristol's pregnancy when he chose Bristol's mom as his running mate. If that's true, which I doubt, then he's complicit in exposing a teenage girl to the glare of nationwide scrutiny.
After all, only the stunningly naive would think the media, the blogosphere and the public wouldn't want to share a few thoughts on the matter.
The blogs, of course, have percolated with folks celebrating the public comeuppance of an elected official who advocates abstinence-only sex education while her eldest daughter so clearly has failed to abstain.
Sure, and there's the fact that Palin also cut funding for a program for teen mothers in Alaska. This, while teenage pregnancy rates nationwide are rising for the first time in more than a dozen years.
Serious policy questions lurk under the surface of the personal soap opera the Palin family has brought to national attention.
Some of us believe that many issues should remain a matter of private choice. A woman's right to determine her family size, for example, is her own choice, and so are her views on birth control and abortion.
So is a pregnant teenager's decision to have her baby – or not – without becoming the source of nationwide discussion.
Some things simply are no one's business but your own.
But the same social conservatives who have happily applauded the Palins for resolving their private family dramas in a way acceptable to the movement – as if Bristol Palin were a teachable moment instead of teenager dragged into the public eye – would also like to deny everyone else the freedom to decide what's best for themselves and their families.
So to me, the deepest hypocrisy is that of a political movement that devotes itself to intruding on people's personal lives and most intimate decisions, yet whose members now act shocked that anyone would dare dispute the Palin family's moral judgment.
You reap what you sow.
Call The Bee's Anita Creamer, (916) 321-1136.
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