Sarah Palin and Family Values

For the record, I despise Sarah Palin. I think she has all of W's faults: she thinks she's on a mission from God, she has no ability to question her own actions or admit that she is wrong, she lies, she is mean and vindictive, she pretends to be a fiscal conservative while spending lots of money and running up debt, and she hides her ignorance of the world behind folksy, regular girl mannerisms. She would be disastrous vice president. And Americans, having learned nothing from their experience with Bush, seem to be falling for her. Sigh.

But what I find most interesting in her story is what it tells us about the whole issue of conservative "family values." This phrase entered the national debate in the 1980s as a package deal. Opposition to abortion and gay rights was expressed as a defense of the stable nuclear family, which was under siege from divorce, drugs, and a general slide into immorality.

The praise heaped on Palin by evangelical conservatives exposes the contradictions in the family values program. Palin's family is frankly something of a mess. She is feuding with her ex-brother-in-law, her teenage daughter is pregnant, her husband left his job so she could have her unexpected baby and keep working at her own. The tabloids are saying she has had affairs. But all the evangelicals love her because she is living her opposition to abortion, keeping her own Downs Syndrome baby and pressuring her daughter to have her own baby and marry the father.

Haven't Palin and her admirers noticed that the divorce rate for 17-year-olds is over 50%? That girls who have babies before they turn 18 are much less likely to finish college or earn a good living? That children born to teen mothers, married or not, are much more likely to have trouble in school, take drugs, and end up in prison? Is that the kind of choice that really represents "family values"?

If what you want is for every child to be raised in a stable, two-parent family, then what you want is for everybody to wait until they are 25 to marry and wait until they are married to have children. We have moved a long way toward this goal in the past 30 years largely because of abortion. Without abortion there would be millions more unwed teenage mothers, millions more shotgun marriages ending in divorce, millions more troubled children. Opposition to abortion therefore undercuts other parts of the family values agenda.

I wonder whether understanding how this works would undermine support for repealing Roe vs. Wade among the kind of conservatives who long for an orderly society. Because in our world abortion is a force for order, not some sort of chaos agent.