In September, when Sarah Palin announced that her daughter Bristol was pregnant you would have thought the teen had just scored a touch-down judging from the enthusiastic support that came from McCain's evangelical backers.
Bristol was seventeen. The father, Levi Johnson ... self-described on Facebook as Levi "I'm a fucking redneck" Johnson ... clearly a reluctant actor in the over-the-top family drama that was to follow.
But most ridiculous of all was the tidal wave of support that followed the disclosure of Bristol's pregnancy. Evangelicals were delighted ... Bristol wasn't aborting. Gran-to-be Sarah gave the appearance of being untroubled and lost little time on the campaign trail.
Marlys Popma head of evangelical outreach on the McCain campaign told the National Review: “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation.” She meant that to sound like a positive spin as in 'we're all in this together,' but her comment reflects a seriously dysfunctional attitude to teen pregnancy.
An article in the New Yorker titled "Red Sex, Blue Sex" highlights the differences in attitude to teen pregnancy between more liberal minded Americans and their evangelical counterparts:
A book by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin titled “Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers” includes some surprising data drawn from a national survey of some 3,400 thirteen to seventeen year-olds.
Regnerus found that:
More about Regnerus' findings in the New Yorker - here.
But most ridiculous of all was the tidal wave of support that followed the disclosure of Bristol's pregnancy. Evangelicals were delighted ... Bristol wasn't aborting. Gran-to-be Sarah gave the appearance of being untroubled and lost little time on the campaign trail.
Marlys Popma head of evangelical outreach on the McCain campaign told the National Review: “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation.” She meant that to sound like a positive spin as in 'we're all in this together,' but her comment reflects a seriously dysfunctional attitude to teen pregnancy.
An article in the New Yorker titled "Red Sex, Blue Sex" highlights the differences in attitude to teen pregnancy between more liberal minded Americans and their evangelical counterparts:
Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
A book by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin titled “Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers” includes some surprising data drawn from a national survey of some 3,400 thirteen to seventeen year-olds.
Regnerus found that:
According to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen.
Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception ... only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.
More about Regnerus' findings in the New Yorker - here.
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