1 Boring Old Man

Father of Palin’s baby going to GOP Convention

Levi Johnston, the boyfriend of Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old pregnant daughter Bristol, is going to join the Palin family at the Republican National Convention, according to his mother. Sherry Johnston, mother of Levi Johnston, talks about her son at her home in Wasilla, Alaska Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008. Levi is the boyfriend of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s unwed, pregnant daughter and he’lll join the family of the Republican vice presidential candidate at the party’s convention in St. Paul, Minn.

Sherry Johnston told reporters that Levi, 18, left Alaska on Tuesday to fly to St. Paul, Minn., according to the Associated Press. GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is due to deliver a speech on Wednesday night and, by tradition, the members of her family would join her at the conclusion of her lecture. Bristol, the 17-year-old daughter of Alaska Governor and presumptive Republican Vice Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, is five-months pregnant.

When asked whether the young couple had been pressured to marry, the boy’s mother said the two teenagers had not been pressured to marry, but had made the decision before finding out that Bristol was pregnant. "This is just a bonus," Sherry Johnston said.

A Palin relative told People magazine that the couple’s romance and pregnancy was not a secret among family members in Wasilla. "They kind of let everyone know [last May] and word traveled quick," the relative says. "We were surprised, but everyone is positive."

One might say that this Bristol Palin/Levi Johnston story is hypocritical – a Christian Fundamentalist family who believes in the sanctity of marriage and sexual abstinence until the knot is tied. Such a family is opposed to abortion. So, we could say, "Shame. Shame. You preach one thing but practice another." But saying such a thing is mighty silly in a real world. Young people who are smittem with each other have sex. That’s just what they do. It’s what they’ve always done. From a cosmic point of view, human beings are little more than a very complex covering on germ cells looking to get together anyway.

And, as a matter of fact, sexual attraction comes before thoughts about having babies and raising a family [at least in boys who grow up to be 1boringoldmen]. So, there came to be things like condoms and birth control pills – designed to make the choice of having children available to adolescents for the first time in history.

There are a number of arguments against promiscuity. It spreads disease. It makes sex "routine," and marriage and monogamy isn’t altogether easy – so a good sexual relationship goes a long way towards taking some of the sting out of being close. But there’s nothing that I can think of that would suggest that abstinence prior to lifelong marriage is universally good for people – if it’s not something they wanted themselves.

So, unless young Levi and Bristol are very unusual young people, they – like billions before them – are moving forward into adulthood and parenthood having made the decision to become intimate before making the decision to commit to a lifelong bond and children. I hope it works out for them. There are plenty of examples where it works out fine. Plenty where it doesn’t. Their parents are doing the right thing, blessing the whole business. I expect they’re all fine parents.

But why in the hell is Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket to appease the medieval Pro-Life lunatics who oppose sensible approaches to their own children’s, and other people’s children’s, sexuality? When the issue is called, Sarah’s doing the right thing. But in the privacy of her own mind, I expect she wishes she hadn’t been pushing the abstinence thing so hard and avoiding having the difficult talk with her kids the rest of us had.