Let’s be honest here – I’m not a particular fan of the woman, and I hate The View.

That said, she “gets it” on the Bristol Palin pregnancy.

God bless this woman for sticking with her kid. Because there are a lot of kids out there who get tossed out, thrown away, who are on their own. And so I tip my hat, and IÂ’m a pro-choice person. I tip my hat. My kid made her decision to have her baby. WasnÂ’t the choice that I would have liked her to make at 15, maybe not. But, you know, it worked out. Thank you God.

Now I’ll be real here – Goldberg isn’t going to cast a vote for the McCain-Palin ticket. But she sees what so many of us see – there is a right way and a wrong way for parents to handle a teenage pregnancy, and the Palins are doing it the right way.

I work with teenagers every day. Every year I have a bunch of pregnant girls in my classes, and also fathers-to-be. I don’t condone the actions that got them there, but I do my best to give them all the love and support I can. I’ve done the same with students who have aborted – some of whom think they were correct, and some of whom come to realize they were tragically wrong. And as an aside to Goldberg’s colleague Joy Behar – my students are have been 80-90% minority, and the proportion of those pregnant has reflected those numbers. It is called compassion. It is called love.

Good people, including those raised with conservative moral values, make bad choices and find themselves living with unintended consequences of those choices (not “punishment”, Barack). It is the obligation of the rest of the good people in the world to lend them our support when that happens. And the first line of support has to be the family – even when those teens went against the values which their parents tried to teach them and which they failed to live up to.

Interestingly enough, we know from her own life’s story that Whoopi didn’t do a particularly good job of dealing with just such a situation in her family. Maybe that makes her better equipped to comment than some of the “perfect people” in the media, the liberal blogosphere, and in public office who consider these two young people “fair game” in an effort to get Bristol’s mother.

But in the end, it isn’t about politics. It is about meeting our fellow human beings where they are when they are dealing with the difficulties that are a part of the human condition dating back to the Garden of Eden (be it a literal or metaphorical place). Sadly, large chunks of our society haven’t done a good job with that in the last week – and has then had the audacity to sit in judgment of those who have.

Posted by: Greg at 09:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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