On the Palin pregnancy

We agree with Senator Obama’s assertion that candidates’ minor children should be off limits in political debate. We agree with the blogger Hilzoy who wrote: “To my mind, this extends to using [Sarah Palin’s] daughter as evidence that abstinence-only education doesn’t work: presumably, no one thinks that it works 100% of the time, and that’s the only claim to which this one counterexample could possibly be relevant.” We don’t think the issue of whether the Palins’ youngest child will be properly cared for if his mother becomes vice president is relevant, either. However, as parents, we wonder at the judgment of the two adults who put a 17-year-old child in the position to have her premarital pregnancy become front page news. And as cynics, we suspect that Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and others would be handling this matter rather differently if the pregnant teenager were the child of Democrats.