Blue blind spots

Non-evangelical Americans were puzzled as to why Bristol Palin’s pregnancy caused so little distress among evangelicals, so it was only a matter of time until someone in the chattering classes tried to explain the matter. Margaret Talbot’s article on the subject in the New Yorker, “Red Sex, Blue Sex,” is an intriguing stab in the direction of an answer, but its brief, shallow treatment of the question left me dissatisfied.

It’s always seemed to me that right-wing-appeasing liberals of the Hilary Clinton ilk, who think they can find common ground with anti-abortionists in the goal of reducing teen pregnancy, were not only wrong to concede that abortion is a “tragedy,” but also wrong in the assumption of common ground on teen pregnancy. (This showed, I think, the same tin ear for both effective politics and integrity that Hilary exhibited in thinking she could get universal healthcare if she just made enough compromises with the insurance industry, and that Bill showed in just about every issue he ever addressed.)

Here’s what I’ve always suspected: Reducing teen pregnancy isn’t a goal of the religious right. Their reaction to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy suggests I’m right. Religious conservatives aren’t horrified by sex before marriage or sex by teens (in fact, your mainstream liberals may be more uncomfortable with teenage sex). In fact, teen pregnancy is actually more good than bad, in the religious right worldview. More (white) babies is good, but, more important, girls having babies young, as long as they get married—and within a conservative social framework pregnancy can push women into marriage--helps keep women disempowered and under the control of men. The bedrock of religious right ideology is gender hierarchy. Sex, even teen sex, isn’t bad, as long as it’s controlled by men (or boys) and women pay the price for it. (For more evidence that this is so, check out The Girls Who Went Away and my review of it.)

All this makes sense of the various phenomena Talbot describes. Liberals may be as much—or even more—uncomfortable with teen sex as religious conservatives, but liberal culture has absorbed the assumption that women deserve independent lives and careers. Having babies young, in this you’re-on-your-ownership society that lacks either strong government supports for mothers or strong extended family supports, is an economic and personal disaster. These are such fundamental assumptions of liberal culture as to be invisible to most liberals and centrists, which is why they assume without evidence that the religious right must share their goal of reducing teen pregnancy. The liberal worldview on these matters is a muddle—motivated half by a moral impulse, namely feminism's call for the equality of half the world, which it can’t quite yet really own, and half by economic rationality. Whereas the conservative worldview is pure, principled, and coherent (though of course it runs counter both to economic reality in the 21st century and to the great arc of history in favor of the principle of equality).