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• Tuesday, September 2, 2008 06:26 AM

  Families ARE fair game

  I'm sorry, but everything about your family is fair game in American politics. For a nation that talks so much about privacy, Americans practice so very little of it, it can be unsettling to an outside observer. Why not try what most of the rest of the world does. KEEP YOUR FAMILY OFF THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL! They're not running for office. I don't need to see your wife or husband, or your dozen children every time I see you, Palin (or McCain or Obama or Biden for that matter). I don't need to watch you say goodnight to them in a national convention, Obama.

  This is exactly the opposite of family values. It's repulsive to drag children and teenagers to a stage. It's disrespectful to carry spouses around like a purse. Don't these spouses have lives, jobs, responsibilities? Seriously? Individuals run for jobs in democracies. Families stay at home. Do you take your spouse and children to a job interview? How does having a family qualify anyone for any job? But if you insist on bringing your teenagers and 4-month-old to the stage and making a political show out of it, your family IS fair game to me. If you try to present teenage pregnancy as something wonderful, rather than seeing it as what it is, a mistake that has to be dealt with (no a child is never a mistake, what Bristol did was a mistake), I will have to respond to that because it's not wonderful, it should be prevented, your daughter has further justified and normalized teenage pregnancy to millions of girls around the country now. Don't cry foul.

  I also love that Republicans just cannot stop talking about personal responsibility until one of them utterly fails in showing responsibility about something as crucial as unintended teenage pregnancy and then, it's all about how "things happen", "this is a normal family". I don't know what kind of normal family you're talking about because I did not have a single friend who got pregnant as a teenager. I guess my environment was abnormal. Oh wait, our families were actually responsible and we all knew about that thing called "protection". Parents, it takes a banana, a condom and about 5 minutes of conversation, it'll save you a lot of trouble.

  —hobgoblin Read hobgoblin's other letters
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