Reply #42: I hate to say it but the soccer moms [View All]

glom onto the whole motherhood issues and, as retrograde as it is (yeah, I know... isn't this what we are fighting against) are judging her on her abilities as a mother.

Bristol's pregnancy is a huge doubting point for these women. A lot of them can disregard her hypocrisy between her platform of abstinence and what actually happened in her family, but for a lot of women, they aren't too keen on a teenage pregnant daughter.

You end up with a lot of tortured logic where the women rationalize that in a small town, you "have to get married"... (didn't we fight against this years ago... not to praise teen pregnancy... but we did get rid of shotgun marriages...). I mean the conversations can get pretty weird.

The same thing with Trig....there's a lot of hypocrisy between her method of child care (one could argue that's what a successful career woman should be allowed to do, ie delegate the day to day to someone else. Even when that child is very needy), what a mother should be doing, what she can do at taxpayer expense, what she can do because of her income level, and public policy.

Start walking through what's happening in her life as an exhibit of what adequate child care policies for the disabled should be and you'll see a lot of contradictions.

I'm really not sure that there is any mother that has a disabled child that flies that child around the country with them on multi-city business trips.

The soccer moms aren't grasping these issues in the abstract -- they are looking at them in a visceral fashion. I've tried talking about things the way that you suggest and it's not sticking. I've had the sports complex rationalized as a job creation machine that would help the meth addicts.