Taking responsibility

We’ve all heard it at least once by now.

A professor asks his class for opinions about Sarah Palin and her quick rise in the political sphere as John McCain’s vice-presidential pick.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get one or two educated answers about Palin’s policies or experience.

But if your experience is like mine, you’ll have a liberal sitting in the front row, jumping in her seat to blurt out the only thing she can come up with to denounce the woman:
“Her daughter’s pregnant!”

Isn’t it amazing what a college education can teach us?

Yes, the 17-year-old daughter of Sarah Palin is pregnant. But – SHOCKER – the teenage Bristol Palin is not the vice-presidential candidate.

Now, I could go ahead and state how the unwed Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is irrelevant to the campaign, and nobody’s business but her own. But I don’t believe this. Politics is a dirty world, and unfortunately, that’s not going to change. As soon as her mother accepted the nomination, every bodily function of Bristol Palin became fair game.
Can I blame the liberals for jumping at the chance to defame someone associated with that evil Republican Party? No. But I can blame them for failing to discover the real issue here.

Sarah Palin has conservative values. She has family values. Do I think she taught her kids that young, unprotected sex was a good idea? No. But in my opinion, she taught them something more important: to take responsibility for their actions.
Bristol Palin made a mistake – a mistake that will change her life and probably ruin a lot of future opportunities. But instead of choosing the easy route, she chose to sacrifice a big part of her life to save another.

No American is perfect. But every American has the opportunity to right a wrong. Aborting an innocent life just because it “wasn’t the time to have a kid” is not righting a wrong. It’s murder.

So next time you hear someone use Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as evidence against Palin’s conservativeness, shoot them down. Conservatives don’t expect everyone to be perfect – they recognize that people make mistakes. But what separates conservative ideology from liberalism is how they respond to mistakes. They don’t run to the government, look for handouts, or thoughtlessly kill a living person. Instead, conservatives suffer the consequences and do what’s right. Only by dealing with consequences can people expect to grow and expect their situations to improve. Sarah Palin, in my opinion, has been a shining example of the conservative philosophy.

A liberal classmate of mine once said, “What kind of a mother would put her pregnant daughter in the spotlight like that?”

My answer? The kind of mother who is proud of her daughter’s selflessness. The kind of mother who raised her child to value another life more than her own. The kind of mother that should be our first female vice president.