Like a lot of other conservatives, I cringe at kids in daycare. There are a lot of families that don't have much choice on this; they need both incomes to pay the bills--and they aren't living all that well, even with both Mom and Dad working full-time. (Oddly enough, back when most mothers stayed home to raise kids, there were thus about 70% fewer Americans looking for jobs. Individual worker wages were higher, and many fathers were able to raise a family on one income. Odd how that works, isn't it?)
There are other families that do have some choice on this. We used to live in California. One of our neighbors did daycare. She finally stopped doing it because of the situation with one of the kids. Mom had some important job with a bank in San Francisco; she drove a shiny new BMW. Six weeks after giving birth to her son, she was dropping him off at daycare every morning and heading to work. She was gone from 7:00 AM to 6:30 PM.
Dad gave instructors to the daycare provider to not tell Mom about the first time her son rolled over, or took his first steps, or spoke his first words. Dad wanted Mom to think that she was there for these emotionally significant steps. By the time this yuppie puppy was two years old, he would only call the daycare provider "Mom" and would actually hit his biological mother when she arrived in the evening to pick him up. If that doesn't make your want to cry, you might want to skip the rest of this posting.
Some Democrats are criticizing Governor Palin for putting the pursuit of political office above the needs of her family. Now, if conservatives were doing so (and a few, such as Dr. Laura Schlesinger, apparently are), it would be a consistent position, although one that you could still criticize as "old-fashioned." But the Democrats are the party of subsidized daycare and aggressive, sometimes bizarre enforcement of laws against employment discrimination based on sex. And they are complaining that Governor Palin shouldn't be running for office because she has three kids at home, one of whom has Down's Syndrome and thus needs more attention? If Democrats who are making this criticism mean it, I guess that they will be arguing for revising the sex discrimination laws next to allow--no require--employers to discriminate against women with minor age children at home.
Would I like to see more mothers staying home to raise their own kids? Absolutely. Should they be required to do so? No. They should have that choice, free of the continual culture war sniping of the left that any woman who stays home to raise her own kids is somehow beneath contempt--practically a domestic, in the eyes of many feminists.
UPDATE: Karl Lembke makes a very similar argument (great minds think alike) over here:
A third argument has to do with the pregnancy of Palin's daughter. If this had happened in a leftist family, there'd be much less fuss made over it, or expected in the media. The daughter could abort, and it would be a woman exercising her freedom of reproductive choice. Or she could move in with her boyfriend (or girlfriend) (or both) and it would be celebrated as an "alternative lifestyle". But conservatives advocate standards, and any deviation from those standards is always called "hypocrisy", never "being human and failing to live up to high standards". Here, we have the Left assuming the Palin family, and indeed, the entire pro-life movement, acts like the caricatures dreamed up by the Left. Upon hearing of Bristol's pregnancy out of wedlock, they imagine the instant response is to drag her out to the city gates and stone her to death. Well, maybe just kick her out into the street and erase every mention of her from their lives. For a pro-life, conservative Christian to love and support anyone who has strayed from the straight and narrow must be hypocrisy.
Expect to see more of this sort of argument. Expect accusations of double standards to be leveled. Expect critical distinctions to be blurred, in an effort to make this argument more credible.
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