Wednesday February 04, 2009

THE CONSERVATIVE RESURGENCE PROCEEDS APACE. Mona Charen does an article about Nadya Suleman's octuplets and how awful it is that she had them. Actually she thinks it's awful that anyone has them or, it seems, any multiple births promoted by "fertility drugs," but never mind that. The real problem for Charen is that Suleman is unmarried and thus had the babies as "a kind of self-expression." Aside from backwoodsmen who raise young'uns expressly to chop firewood and continue their feuds unto the next generation, "self-expression" might describe, however uncharitably, most people's procreative impulse, that being a mystery most of us choose to portray more poetically, particularly this soon after the Miracle of Childbirth. But most of us are not rightwing harpies looking for potential welfare queens to cluck over.

I do agree with Charen that, though I wish Suleman all the best (actually that's not our point of agreement -- nowhere does Charen express it), she would have done better to arrange for adequate support before increasing her brood to 14. So we might expect that Charen's next test case -- Linda Sanchez, a presumably well-fixed U.S. Representative from California who is having a child out of wedlock -- would receive her approbation. Or we might if we didn't know who we were dealing with. Charen responds to Sanchez' modest assertion, "I don't know how it'll be received," thus:

Yes, well, she needn’t have worried. Everyone was totally understanding. No marriage yet either.

People think the old stigma about unwed childbearing was all about sex. It wasn’t. It was about children and what’s best for them. Of course some women want babies the way others crave shoes, but babies are not, or at least shouldn’t be treated as, consumables. Badly done all around.

At The Corner, Charen reveals that Representative Sanchez's communications director had the nerve to remonstrate with her baby shower gift of bile. Charen claims she didn't compare Sanchez with Suleman, which is self-evident bullshit, and tells her that Sanchez and all unwed mothers are "irresponsible to purposely bring a child into the world in those circumstances when you can avoid it."

Then Ramesh Ponnuru and Charen chuckle over the staffer's use of the term "unofficial fiance," and Lisa Schiffren joins them around the cauldron to suggest that the term "will be fully explicated in the upcoming movie, He's Just Not That Into You." Then she gives Bristol Palin a hard time, too (as she has elsewhere) and adds, "I have an uncomfortable sense that the younger ones value the wedding itself -- and the dress, which won't look as good if you're preggers -- more than the fact of the marriage. But that doesn't explain the older, wiser, Sanchez -- whose entire rationale is that, at 40 she is approaching the sell by date for those eggs."

This harshing on new and expectant mothers must be part of some very deep plan to win popular support to the conservative movement. These horrible people keep bitching that they should be allowed to run Hollywood, but what they really need is a gossip magazine.