Why Bristol Palin Is Different

Ever since Sarah Palin revealed that her unmarried teenage daughter Bristol was pregnant, conservatives have been struggling with what liberals see as a contradiction between our fierce opposition to unwed motherhood and our support for Palin and family values. Now comes word that the wedding is off and conservatives once again are having difficulty explaining why Bristol Palin is different from other unwed mothers.

During the campaign Focus on the Family's James Dobson largely ignored the difficult unwed mother question and congratulated her on not having an abortion. Party of Death author Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out that she was not technically an unwed mother yet because she was engaged, unlike Murphy Brown, even though that didn't quite work out in the end. Others took a Kübler-Ross journey from denial to anger to acceptance.

When some liberals attacked conservatives for being hypocritical, future New York Times columnist Ross Douthat brilliantly exposed their own hypocrisy. "Suppose that social conservatives hadn't rallied around the Palin family after news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy broke," he wrote. "If anything remotely like this had happened, all we'd hear is satisfied chirping about how the response to Bristol Palin's pregnancy proves, once and for all, that social conservatives don't give two figs about the rights of the unborn; what they really care about is controlling women's sex lives and reinforcing patriarchal norms, full stop…. They're mad that religious conservatives aren't fitting neatly into the stereotypes that liberals have spent years cultivating." In other words, liberals would have attacked us even if we had responded the way they thought we would based on what we have said in the past, so by responding in a completely opposite way we proved how hypocritical they are. But although Douthat gleefully pointed out liberals' hypocrisy, he seemed reluctant to point out why conservatives were not being hypocritical even though the answer was staring him in the face.

Why is Bristol Palin different? She is different because she is a conservative.

It's different when unmarried teenage mothers come from conservative, wealthy Christian families. Although it would be preferable if her child had a father, even a white trash one, she will still be able to raise her child with the kinds of values that liberals, poor people, gays and non-Christians would not be able to give to their little bastard children who are destined to become our future criminals. Why are conservatives so reluctant to point out this obvious fact?

The problem with Murphy Brown, who was famously attacked by Dan Quayle in a speech written by Lisa Schiffren, was not just that she was an unwed mother but that she was a liberal unwed mother. As a liberal and a fictional character she would not be able to raise her child with good, conservative, Christian, nonfictional values. And the problem with Rep. Loretta Sanchez, whom Schiffren attacked for having a child before she married her fiancé, is that she is a liberal and her child is doomed to grow up without any values at all. But Schiffren, who supported Sarah Palin, seemed reluctant to point out this important difference, writing, "Being 18 and a single mother is only a little easier for a pretty, middle-class girl than it is for less well-protected girls from those parts of our society where marriage and involved fathers disappeared a couple of generations ago" and finally concluding "all I have to say is, 'poor girl.'" Instead of appearing so tentative, which just made many readers why she hadn't gone after Bristol with the same vehemence that characterized her attacks on a liberal fictional character and a liberal congresswoman, Schiffren should say out loud what all conservatives are thinking: Being an unwed mother is different when you're a conservative.

Kathryn Jean Lopez has been one of our strongest advocates for the need for children to have two parents of the opposite sex, which is why, like Sarah Palin, she is opposed to gay marriage and supports a Constitutional amendment banning it. But instead of noting that Bristol Palin's child will grow up without a father, she wrote, "Let the girl live in peace with her child." Her reaction was similar to the response she had when the Vice President's lesbian daughter Mary Cheney decided to have a baby: "Unless Mary Cheney asks to be a spokeswoman on the issue, folks ought to leave her alone." And yet when she wrote about lesbian Rosie O'Donnell's efforts to adopt a child, Lopez felt compelled to point out her "concerns about instability, sexual-orientation confusion, and emotional problems." What is the difference between Mary Cheney and Rosie O'Donnell? Again, it's obvious. Mary Cheney is a good conservative woman who will no doubt teach her children that they shouldn't become lesbians like their mother and Rosie O'Donnell is a foul-mouthed liberal who will teach her children that homosexuality and bestiality are acceptable lifestyle choices.

Some conservatives have attacked Bristol. Debbie Schlussel claims that conservatives should be "intellectually honest," and expresses the bizarre notion that we should apply the exact same standards to conservatives that we apply to liberals. "If one of Barack Obama's daughters was a single mother, we conservatives would be legitimately all over it. Or if her name was Sha'niqua," she writes. (I'm not sure why she believes the situation would have been different if Sarah Palin had given her daughter a black-sounding name.) Schlussel then blames the fact that Sarah Palin is a working mother for her daughter's pregnancy, which is absurd because Palin supporter Phyllis Schlafly proved long ago that you can work and still be a good mother as long as you are a conservative. Robert Stacy McCain also condemned Bristol harshly, writing, "A child's misconduct always reflects poorly on the family" and then went on to denounce girls who would not date him when he was single because they were "snooty, stuck-up, cliqueish, insufferable demanding, with a high-handed and disdainful way of dealing with people beneath her status, having a self-important attitude," which is of course understandable because what girl from a good family wouldn't have wanted to date McCain when he was single, but again I'm not sure what the relevance is to Bristol Palin although it might be something he would want to explore in therapy.

Although some Palin supporters have expressed disappointment with such views, many conservatives seem to be reluctant to write about this subject at all. Why aren't more conservatives standing up and defending Bristol Palin? Why can't we unequivocally state there should be different standards for liberals and conservatives? One of the problems with liberalism is that they believe everyone is the same and that all morality is relative. But if there is anything that conservatives reject it is the idea of moral equivalency. When America tortures a terrorist suspect that is not the same as when a terrorist tortures someone. Killing civilians in a war or accidentally executing the innocent is not the same as abortion. Denying gays the right to marry is not the same as outlawing miscegenation. Giving corporations tax cuts is not the same as welfare. David Vitter and Larry Craig are not the same as Bill Clinton. Liberals are always trying to confuse us by making false analogies but conservative ideology is based on rejecting false equivalencies and making important distinctions. So we shouldn't be reluctant to say that indeed it is different when a conservative teenager has a child out of wedlock and an inner-city liberal teenager does. We should have the courage of our convictions and not play the liberal game of moral equivalency. Instead of trying to explain away Bristol's pregnancy we should be defending it, holding her up as an example of the difference between liberal teenage unwed mothers and conservative teenage unwed mothers. Because just as it is true that, as Richard Nixon once said, "When the President does it, that means it is not illegal." when a good Christian conservative has a child out of wedlock, that means it's not immoral.

Update: Lisa Schiffren responds with a very thoughtful email: "I see this a little differently than you do. I agree with Kathryn that there is a difference between a grown woman in a position of power (Rosie, Murphy (fictional, but..) and Sanchez), and a private citizen, like Cheney, and even more so like Bristol Palin who got pregnant at 17. If she had committed a felony she would have been punished lightly. As it is, she is a kid who made a mistake and will pay a lot for it -- in the public eye for reasons not of her creation. The other women are role models, who exert cultural influence -- and the first three made a big point of rationalizing and justifying their actions. I don't know about the liberal/conservative divide. I think it matters some, but not ultimately. Religion matters more. And personal grit more still. A large, supportive family helps. If I sounded tentative, it is because I think that we, as a society, have so screwed this up that it is hard to see a way back to a norm of marriage before babies."

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Rod Dreher Finds the Subtle Nuances in Mass Murder

Rod Dreher was shocked by the story of a Texas man whose wife and children were slaughtered by his daughter and her friends. But he wasn't shocked by the brutal murder itself. Murders happen all the time. Big deal. What shocked him was a passing remark by the father who survived the attack by Erin, his little murderess. After he moved his family from the small Texas town of Celeste (pop. 800) to the liberal Emory (pop. 1200) his daughter was subject to the horrors of big city debauchery. "Emory has a lot of bisexual kids; it's like it was almost cool to be bisexual. One of the first things that happened was some girl wanted to be Erin's little girlfriend. And I was like, 'That ain't happenin'.' "

Dreher was understandably shocked by this revelation. "This is a tiny East Texas town -- and there's a bisexual culture in one of them, among the teenagers?" he wrote. "WTF? What do I not get about teenage life these days? What do I not get about the cultural air kids breathe? I am so not going to give my children over to this culture, if I can help it." If for some reason Dreher's children decide to murder him, though I can't think of any reason why they would off the top of my head, at least he'll go to his grave comforted by the thought that he saved them from the evils of bisexuality.

But as horrifying as this story of bisexuality is, it does have a silver lining. As soon as Erin's parents realized that the public schools in Emory were cesspools of bisexual Bacchanalia, they took their kids out of school and started home schooling them. When they re-enrolled Erin in public school three years later, she was armed with the values she learned from being home schooled and didn't fall back into a lesbian lifestyle. Instead, started dating an 18-year-old boy, which must have been a big relief to her parents. Unfortunately, it was this boy who then helped her murder her family. But if you look past the murders, this story actually has a happy ending because it shows that it is possible to save our kids from homosexuality and that should give Dreher some solace when he gets over his shock.

Unfortunately, some people willfully misread Dreher's column and claimed that Dreher was saying that bisexuality caused the murders when in fact he was just focusing on the most horrific aspect of the story. Dreher is used to being willfully misread like this and having his values and priorities questioned. Recently, for example, he wrote a column pointing out that our "social decline" did not begin with the Sixties but back in that dark period known as the Enlightenment. "The question, though, is not whether the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad, but whether on balance the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad. I answer in the negative," he wrote. Again, some people misread his column to mean that he thinks we should revive slavery or the Inquisition. But if you read his column carefully, you see that he is just saying that on the whole things were better before we had homosexuality, abortion, feminism and horseless carriages even when you balance those things against slavery and torturing heretics.

But Dreher is not the only conservative intellectual who is sadly misunderstood. Unfortunately, a lot of liberals just don't get the subtle nuances of some of Rush Limbaugh's thinking either. Some conservatives, like David Frum, are saying that Rush does not help our cause when he says, for example, that he wants President Obama to fail. Others even claim that we should be disingenuous and talk down to people instead. "The problem is, Americans have short attention spans and don’t always do nuance well," says one of our most nuanced thinkers, Paterico.

But I agree with Jeff Goldstein who says, "I don’t want to have to measure every word I say with the thought in mind that somebody is going to take me out of context. Instead, I’d like to be free to say what I mean." Goldstein is tired of pandering to people who think "it’s just too damn difficult to demand that what we mean be presented honestly, and so rather than fight that kind of complicated battle, it’s best just to learn to self-edit in a way that placates those who don’t do nuance well."

Although I often don't understand what Goldstein is trying to say, it would be a tragedy if he tried to pander to people like me and write things that people can actually comprehend. And I don't think Dreher should worry if people believe that he cares more about bisexuality than murder or that he wants us to return to a time when people who were not Catholics like him were burned at the stake when that is not what he is saying at all. And if some people cannot understand the subtle difference between wanting Obama to fail, plunging America into a Great Depression or wanting Obama's policies to fail, plunging America into a Great Depression, then is it really worth the energy to try to explain to them what Rush really meant?

So I hope that conservatives will say more things that can be taken out of context by the liberal media and continue to make subtle distinctions that can't be understood in 30-second sound bites. It is time for us to gird our loins (whatever that means) and fight complicated battles. Sure, we might lose a few elections and we might give people the false impression that we are homophobic or racist or misogynist or that we want America to fail and be punished for its decadence, but that's a small price to pay to hold on to our integrity, which is what is really important. Instead of making compromises, the way to get back into the good graces of the American people and start winning elections again is to stick to our guns and not be afraid to call Americans who don't understand what we mean "idiots." And if you don't think this is a winning strategy, then you're an idiot.

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10 Best Conservative Movies

National Review, which did such a wonderful job identifying hidden conservative messages in rock songs a few years ago, has now come up with a list of the Best Conservative Movies. Although their list for the most part sticks to derrièrist principles by not including too many difficult movies, for some reason they named The Lives of Others, a boring foreign film I've never heard of, as their number one movie and even included a tedious talky independent film like Metropolitan. They did include The Dark Knight, however, which should head off angry emails from fans and derrièrist critics who think it was the greatest movie ever made. Of course, I would have included The Dark Knight on my list, too, as well as such conservative classics as Brazil and Red Dawn, but there are so many great conservative movies, I decided not to duplicate anything that appeared on their list. And while their list only included films of the last 25 years (probably because the editors of National Review haven't seen any movies older than that), I also included a few older movies; but don't worry, none of them are in black and white (except for one, but give it a chance; it gets better).

Neither of our lists is definitive. I'm sure you can think of a lot of other great conservative movies. Feel free to mention them in the comments. Some of the other great conservative movies I might have included that didn't quite make the cut include The Grapes of Wrath, Birth of a Nation, Norma Rae, Easy Rider, Slumdog Millionaire, and Showgirls, just to name a few. But these lists are not meant to identify every great conservative movie. The real purpose of these lists is to show that conservatives are actually normal people, who love movies and rock music and video games, who talk a lot about hot women and what we would like to do to them if we were able to get any of them in bed and who use a lot of baseball and basketball metaphors just like regular guys. Hopefully, lists like this, and sites like Big Hollywood, will help change the unfair image of conservatives in the media so that one day we'll be able to say, "You like me! You like me!"

1. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
Dan Quayle's favorite movie, featuring the film debut of former Nixon aide Ben Stein (who discusses the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and the Laffer Curve in one of the film's most moving scenes), Ferris Bueller's Day Off is perhaps the greatest conservative film ever to come out of Hollywood. Matthew Broderick plays Ferris Bueller, who decides he has had enough of liberal indoctrination and skips school on the day of a test about European socialism in protest. "I'm not European," he says. "I don't plan on being European. So who gives a crap if they're socialists? They could be fascist anarchists, it still doesn't change the fact that I don't own a car. Not that I condone fascism." Although liberal Hollywood often tries to caricature conservatives as dorks or villains, someone like Ferris Bueller is who conservatives actually see when we look in the mirror. Someone who is handsome and adored by all the "sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads." Someone who is really, really cool. And, sure, we might total your father's Ferrrari or invade your country without enough troops or trigger a temporary economic meltdown, but we're actually really lovable, the kind of guy you want to have a beer with. And really, really cool.

2. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Why aren't there more films for children that celebrate free-market capitalism? Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a Horatio Alger story about Charlie Bucket, a poor kid who learns that in the free-enterprise system everybody has a randomly equal chance to find a golden ticket (though some special people, like Veruca Salt, have more randomly equal chances than others because a level playing field would be socialism). After finding a golden ticket in his chocolate bar, Charlie meets Willy Wonka, an entrepreneur who has built his candy empire through constant innovation, corporate espionage and cheap labor. Wonka takes Charlie and some other lucky kids on a tour of his factory and gives them a quick lesson in basic economics. His factory is a consumerist paradise, where everything is consumable, although as one unfortunate child learns, consuming beyond your means can get you sucked up into a giant tube. In a free market economy, the kids learn, some will succeed and others will end up as giant blueberries. "Don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted," Wonka instructs Charlie, imparting the film's most important moral lesson. "He lived happily ever after."

3. Home Alone (1990)
Like some of the other films on this list, Home Alone works on several levels. On the one hand it's a family-friendly comedy about an adorable little boy, played by Macaulay Culkin (before he grew up and got weird), fighting off home invaders. But on a deeper level it is a parable about what would happen if we didn't have a Second Amendment. Luckily, Culkin is able to fend off the incompetent criminals who try to break into his home by using ingenious homemade weaponry, but not every little boy in America is as clever as Culkin's screenwriter, John Hughes. If you went on vacation and accidentally left your child at home, wouldn't you feel a lot better if you knew there was a loaded gun in the house that your child could easily access? I know I would. Unfortunately, gun control extremists want to take away our Second Amendment rights by passing all kinds of laws mandating child safety locks and banning assault weapons, rendering our nation's pre-adolescents defenseless. I think the NRA should remake this movie but this time give the little boy a gun. It would be a very short film.

4. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Although a number of liberal critics with their minds in the gutter slandered it as a "gay cowboy movie," Brokeback Mountain is actually a wonderful paen to the virtues of American masculinity. Ranch hand Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are no metrosexuals. They are men's men who love nothing better than engaging in such manly pursuits as camping and fishing and rounding up sheep in the great outdoors. Although both are married and have kids, is it so surprising that they feel more comfortable in the company of other men, resisting the feminizing influences that have polluted our culture since the women's movement? Unfortunately, liberals aren't able to accept that two men can be really good friends without adolescently snickering and insinuating behind their backs that they are gay. They certainly don't act gay. If going fishing with your buddy makes you gay, then a lot of men in America must be gay.

5. Weekend at Bernie's (1989)
Although some might dismiss Weekend at Bernie's as a wacky comedy about young insurance executives who drag the corpse of their wealthy boss around and pretend he is alive, it is actually a penetrating allegory about the evils of the death tax (which liberals euphemistically refer to as the "estate tax"). Is there really that much difference between defiling the dead by taxing their wealth after they die and propping up someone's dead body, putting sunglasses on him and dragging him around the beach pretending he's drunk? Can't liberal vultures just let deceased millionaires pass their estates on to their pampered progeny without government tax collectors extracting their pound of putrefying flesh? Although Weekend at Bernie's is certainly a delightful comedy on one level, it just makes me so mad sometimes when I think of the policy implications that I want to yell at the screen, "Leave Bernie's heirs' trust funds and tax shelters alone!"

6. Wizard of Oz (1939)
Long before homosexuals waved rainbow flags and Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition fomented racial hatred, Dorothy (played by Judy Garland, who later devolved into a pill-popping gay icon) took a nightmarish, drug-fueled trip over the rainbow to a hellish, multicultural dystopia called Oz. Throughout the Wizard of Oz Dorothy is desperate to flee the perversions of Munchkinland, Afghanistan-like poppy fields and urban ghettos of the Emerald City and return home to safe Republican Kansas, where morality is clearly delineated in black and white. At the end of the film when a big government wizard fails to get her back home, she discovers that all she has to do is pull herself up by her own ruby slipper straps. At a time when the great imperial Obama tells us that we need government to help us solve our problems, we should remember what Glinda the Good Witch of the North, tells Dorothy -- that she doesn't need government handouts to help her when she can just get what she needs by clicking her very own pair of ruby slippers and wishing really hard.

7. Starship Troopers (1997)
One of the problems with a lot of liberal Hollywood war movies since Vietnam is that they get all caught up with trying to see the enemy as human beings and depicting war as morally questionable. But Starship Troopers brilliantly spares us all the distracting moralism by stripping war down to its essential elements. It accomplishes this by reducing the enemy to nasty alien insects who look really cool when they blow up so that we can see war in its purest form as the glorious adventure it actually is. Although President Bush accomplished some of the same goals by banning photography of flag-draped coffins and limiting the press's coverage in the battlefield, the war in Iraq would probably have been even more popular if he had been able to convince the American people that the Iraqis were actually giant bugs. Maybe with all the CGI technology we have now a future President waging a future war will be able to do just that.

8. Patch Adams (1998)
It's too bad advocates of socialized medicine don't subscribe to Reader's Digest, which for years has taught us that "Laughter is the Best Medicine." Based on a real-life doctor, Patch Adams, starring Robin Williams in one of his most delightful roles (Williams is so much better in films where he has a director who restrains him), is about a doctor who did have a subscription to Reader's Digest, and realized that all the cheap pharmaceuticals illegally imported from Canada in the world are no match for comedy hijinks. Unfortunately, government bureaucrats try to shut down his comedy clinic just because he is practicing medicine without a license. Although Patch Adams eventually wins his case, imagine if we had socialized medicine and a lot of humorless bureaucrats were given the power to require doctors to have medical degrees and ban them from wearing big red noses and funny glasses or replacing bed pans with whoopee cushions. That's not the kind of America I want. So the next time some liberal complains about the 45 million Americans who are uninsured, spray him with water from the flower in your lapel and send him to see this movie.

9. Planet of the Apes (1968)
Planet of the Apes is based on an intriguing premise: What if evolution were true instead of just an unlikely theory? In this film apes have "evolved" to the point where they talk, wear clothes and walk upright. Evolutionists would have you believe that monkeys are our uncles so if you evolved them a little, then it would stand to reason that they would be just like us. And the apes on this planet sure seem human at first but as the film unfolds we see that there is nothing very human about these animals at all. No matter how you dress them up or how many words of English you teach them in the end they're still just "damned dirty apes," as Charlton Heston discovers. I don't think I've ever seen a better refutation of Darwin's theories.

10. Jaws (1975)
The next time your annoying animal rights activist friend cries and moans about bunnies and puppies and kitties being tortured and murdered in medical labs, pop Jaws in the DVD player and show him what animals are really like. Animals are not really cute and loveable little creatures, living together in harmony in the forest, as animal rights activists would have you believe. Many of them are vicious, amoral killing machines like the shark in Jaws, who would like nothing better than to bite PETA members in half given the chance. Jaws dares to tell the truth about animals. That's why we call them animals. By the end of the film your fauna-hugging friend will be cheering as loudly as you are when the nasty shark is finally blown to smithereens. Then you can take them out for nice hot bowl of shark-fin soup.

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