did Sarah Palin require that they get marriage counseling before breaking up?

What?  Marriage is an adult decision, because it’s a binding legal contract.  People who are adult enough to get married or not should also be adult enough to decide whether or not they need couples counseling before breaking up.

Also, Bristol Palin and Levi Johnstone each have two parents, but apparently only one parent was responsible for whether they sought counseling before ending their romantic relationship?  (Obviously, they will always have some relationship as co-parents of a child.)

But the insecurities that lay under these racist and sexist prejudices are merely napping and will come roaring out to the front again.

Perhaps it can be strangled to death while it sleeps.

“Opponents of President Obama are raising the birth certificate issue as a means of questioning his eligibility to serve as president. Neither of these situations are healthy for our Republic.”

You missed another facet of wingnuttery: “It’s really really awful for the country that people are demanding to examine the kerning on Obama’s birth certificate. Naturally, the only way to stop this is for Obama to hand over his birth certificate so we can look at the kerning.”

Naturally, he’s not saying that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S..  Oh no!

That’s exactly what he’s saying. Obama will be a candidate for president in 2012.

“[T]he problem is that Congress did impeach Bill Clinton for getting a blow job.”

Yet, no impeachment of Bush for torture, murder, kidnapping, eternal imprisonment, shredding the Constitution, cronyism in independent executive offices, corruption, and so much more. And now we cannot even have a Truth Commission, much less prosecution of torture, murder, kidnapping. I guess when it’s about sex everyone is breathless to get to the bottom of every lurid detail - perhaps to add some spice to their boring and prudish lives - but, when Americans commit grave wrongs against other people, directed by an incompetent, corrupt and evil leader we freely chose (twice), we are still the City on a Hill who will hear, see and speak no evil.

<blockquote>2) If a mother chooses to carry a baby to term, under what circumstances should she consider putting him up for adoption? <blockquote>

He makes sure to accent the genders in this equation, doesn’t he?  Assuming a male baby makes the mother’s power all the more loathsome to his views.

Why don’t I ever press preview?

Any law that would have made Abraham Lincoln ineligible for the Presidency needs to be rethought.

Who was the first President even to have a birth certificate?

Have we seen Bill Posey’s birth certificate yet?

If the certificate provided by the state of Hawaii is insufficient, no one born in Illinois could be President, because that’s all you can get these days.

How does Waldman know that Bristol Palin didn’t consider adoption?  Why is he assuming she didn’t consider all options?

Because if she did she would have obviously come to the right decision, to ask Steve Waldman what the best decision is!

because government isn’t for governing, it’s for waging scorched earth political warfare.

And for looting the Treasury. Can’t forget that side of it.

“And for looting the Treasury. Can’t forget that side of it.”

...well, to the winner goes the spoils. 

Besides, that whole “governing” thing is so last century anyway…

I like the way Levi and his family, as well as Todd (the grandfather) are dissapeared from the discussion. Not that I think any of them should have more say than Bristol but I think there is something going on in the right wing imagination here. I think they have dissapeared Todd from Palin Mere’s story because they can’t square wanting Palin, qua dominatrix, to lead the party with Todd’s clearly subservient political role. So Waldman wonders whether Sarah Palin intervened enough in Bristol and Levi’s decision because to wonder whether Todd did is to raise the thorny issue of the Patriarchy that didn’t bark in the night. Todd already abdicated his masculine duty when he failed to shoot levi for the premarital sex/protect his virgin daughter. Sarah has had to assume the pants here, as it were, in the storyline but the privilige of violence and dominance that is assumed for the patriarch isn’t assumed for the matriarch so all she has in her armory is “insisting” on “counseling.”  Meanwhile the same could (should?) be argued for Levi’s side of the decision but Waldman can’t insist on the right of the father over the baby because he knows that Levi probably would have been okeydoke with abortion and just squelching the whole thing and because Waldman doesn’t feel comfortable with full on forced marriage *for men* and he can’t figure out any other way to get Bristol married under duress without simply embarrassing her into it. Levi’s just an imaginary adjunct to the passion play, here, and leaving him out almost entirely is a way of obscuring that.

aimai

women cannot be trusted to raise children without male supervision

Sexism cuts both ways on this one.  I am a long time single father (single grandfather at this point), who got custody of my son in the mid-70s in Oklahoma (always a bastion of enlightened progressivism).  Before the judge would grant me custody, despite having a signed waver agreeing to this arrangement from my soon to be ex-wife), he insisted that I get a letter from my mother (I was 24 at the time) saying that she would help me raise my son.  The courts in that era and that region were generally convinced that men were constitutionally incapable of raising children on there own.  One of the reasons I am a feminist today.

Neither of these situations are healthy for our Republic.

And yet, strangely, he’s only introducing legislation to address one of them! I wonder why that is…

(I know you mentioned the false equivalence, but this seems above and beyond. I’d say another feature of wingnuttery is not just lying about your motivations, but obviously lying about them.)

And here I thought freshman + republican = swirly

If a mother chooses to carry a baby to term, under what circumstances should she consider putting him up for adoption?

Something I still don’t understand - No state requires a minor child (young woman) to obtain parental consent or notification to carry a pregnancy to term (far more dangerous than an abortion), yet some states require parental consent or notification for an abortion.

Is a minor required to obtain parental consent to raise a baby or to give it up for adoption?  I doubt it.

cparis,
the “under what circumstances” question is purely imaginary. There are no legal circumstances that force a pregnant teen to “give the baby up for adoption” but waldman is talking in windy hypotheticals. “Should she consider putting him up for adoption” is about some mysterious principle of female self humiliation. Having confessed that her own life and her own independence are nothing compared to the imaginary importance of the future baby the teenage mother is required, by Waldman’s reckoning, to undergo a second period of self flagellation, self criticism, and self doubt by asking herself “am I as worthy as some other imaginary married white couple of raising my child to the fullest of his full potential?” The sexism and misogyny of the question which is asked, apparently, only of single women and not of married couples, is pretty much out there.  Note that he also carefully doesn’t say “under what circumstances ought it to have been assumed that Levi didn’t become the stay at home, custodial parent?” 

In any event the whole waldman essay is an example of slut shaming in the first degree. All of the hypothetical questions are either none of his business or one can presume were “asked and answered” by the perfectly reasonable decisions that the young mother did, in fact, make.  If she’d had the baby and left it to die in a toilet on prom night he might be within his rights to query the decision.

aimai

This whole requiring-birth-certificates nonsense reminds me a lot of the “reading comprehension” and “history” tests black people were made to get before they could register to vote.

Sure, the primary motivation was eliminating as many black people as possible from qualifying to vote. But black people did still qualify to vote, some of them, and even in that case the test requirements served a purpose for institutionalized racism—they served as a reminder that the white authorities were the gatekeepers, the ones who granted the “privilege” of voting.

It’s the same thing here. Their ideal scenario is that the birth certificate bullshit prevents Obama from another term, but even if it doesn’t, if they can bring through these stupid requirements, they will have established their smug superiority by making him jump through hoops for them.

Who was the first President even to have a birth certificate?

I’m pretty sure John Quincy Adams had one.  Of course, in those days, birth certificates in the US were issued by municipalities, not states.

Jupiter, most people didn’t have birth certificates - the records were often kept by the parish and were baptismal records, not birth records.

That is why there are so many children who were nameless and unrecorded outside of family records - they died very young.

A few years back, I wrote to the municipality wherein I was born (New York City), and received in return a piece of paper that is functionally identical to the one the Obama campaign posted.

There is a reason for that - the identity requirements of the federal goverment and many states have standardized the information, the location of the information, and the location of the certifications.

When I took the original certs for my sons to the post office to get their passports, they wouldn’t take them.  They would only accept the standard form records.

Of course, I seem to recall Obama did provide a birth certificate. The Right proclaimed it fake because they weren’t asking in good faith. Neville Chamberlain could have told him not to bother.