The plainer way to say the above is: Believe what your eyes tell you, especially when millions of innocent people’s lives are at stake.
Unfortunately, the lexicon of common sense has become densely complicated in recent years in response to competing lexicons: Bureaucratese, Religious Righteousness, and Doubletalk — the language that requires the skill of talking out of both sides of your mouth.
Which has been the most astonishing response among political operatives to the poignant news that before growing up, before beginning an independent life,
and before making a decision to have the life she is about to have, the 17-year-old daughter of Alaska Gov. and Vice President-select Sarah Palin will have a child, and an accidentally selected husband. At least that’s what the Palin family said they were “proud” to announce.
The response among Republican political operatives, who, it is to be hoped will find jobs waiting for them at greeting card companies when the current campaign season ends, has been the jarringly blasé “Stuff happens.”
The Palin family should be as proud as they want to be, but not of the announcement itself, which validates objections to the “Abstinence Only” form of health and sex education the governor says she espouses.
Objections among those who hope not to see another generation of HIV and AIDS patients after nearly three decades of awareness of this preventable plague to Abstinence Only education is that it is not evidence based. In fact research has shown the opposite — that children exposed only to messages of abstinence, rather than the full body of prevention information available in the 21rst century, are liklier to get sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancies.
Little Bristol Palin has done nothing shameful. Her mother has, in seeing evidence that the policy she espouses has failed, and seeing it in her own home, and ignoring the ramifications for millions of children who are not as well-placed or as fortunate as her daughter seems to be.
Journal of the Plague Years 