Guess who’s the most conservative of the four major candidates vying for presidential offices in the White House this winter? It’s the one who eloped with her high school sweetheart in 1988, who gave birth to her first son eight months later. It’s the one with a 17-year-old daughter who is pregnant and unmarried. It’s the career woman who resumed working at the office just three days after the birth of her fifth child—a Down syndrome baby.

Despite these decidedly untraditional “conservative” values, soon after Sarah Palin was introduced as John McCain’s running mate, the Republican base whipped into an excited frenzy that showed no abatement even as she paraded her dysfunctional family across the center of America’s grandest political stage.

Looking for Real

“People are looking for real,” Republican governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford told the New York Times after news broke that Palin’s daughter was pregnant. “Real means blemishes, real means warts, real means real. These family imperfections make people say, That family isn’t so different from my family” (September 1; emphasis mine throughout).

“If anything, this is a reminder that Sarah Palin is a real person who has the same experiences that regular Americans do,” chimed in Fergus Cullen, the New Hampshire Republican chairman.

Even conservative stalwart James Dobson, who refused to vote for McCain and then changed his mind after he chose Palin, defended the teen pregnancy revelation this way: “[A]ll it really means is that she and her family are human.” Dobson congratulated Palin for “not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances” (ibid.).

But should the Palin family really be held up as a proper role model for family living? Of course every family has its blemishes. But unless we correct those mistakes and flaws, history will simply repeat itself.

Mommy Migration

Over the past 50 years, the number of hours married women spend working outside the home has tripled. And having small children at home has not deterred women from continuing their out-of-home careers. In fact, seven out of ten married women with children under the age of 6 are employed. While this figure includes those who work part-time, the overall trend clearly points to this radical transformation in the mother’s role over the last half century: Caring for children while dad is at work is no longer the primary responsibility for most mothers.

That in turn has left many of our children at home alone, without supervision. And unsupervised teens are much more likely to struggle at school, abuse alcohol, take drugs, view pornography and engage in premarital sex. According to a study published by Pediatrics in December 2002, among sexually active teenage boys, 91 percent said their last sexual encounter was in a home setting and that it was usually after school. The study noted, “Youths who were unsupervised for 30 or more hours per week were more likely to be sexually active compared with those who were unsupervised for 5 hours a week or less.”

Today, the United States has the largest teenage birthrate in the industrialized world: Some 500,000 babies are born to teenage girls every year. Most fathers are long gone by the time the baby arrives. Only one third of teen moms will ever finish high school. And nearly 80 percent will end up on welfare.

And yet, incredibly, since the Palin selection, conservatives have done everything possible to put a positive spin on the epidemic of teen sex and one of its many devastating kickbacks—unwanted pregnancies. Bristol, after all, is supposedly planning to marry the father. And more importantly, she has decided not to have an abortion.

“We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents,” Sarah and Todd Palin said in a statement. “Conservatives” responded as though having the baby is all that’s necessary to value family life. Sarah Palin is a staunch pro-lifer, you see, which automatically qualifies her as the most conservative politician on either ticket.

When asked if Palin could handle the demands of the vice presidency in addition to her responsibilities at home, John McCain’s chief strategist dismissed the question by saying, “I can’t imagine that question being asked of a man.”

To even ask the question is now seen as sexist. And this is supposed to be the party that values family life. Apparently, the only traditional value left on the “conservative” platform is the pro-life position.

The right’s widespread acceptance of Palin as the next vice president actually signals defeat on the “working mom” battleground of the culture wars. As Ellen Goodman pointed out in a September 12 Boston Globe column, “Palin has made it politically incorrect to criticize working mothers. They are the demilitarized zone of the cultural battleground.”

Defeat in a Culture War

Goodman compared statements made by influential conservatives before and after Palin was added to the McCain ticket. They are quite revealing. James Dobson, for example, at one time largely attributed society’s breakdown in the family to “working mothers.” He now says, “I believe Sarah Palin is God’s answer.”

Phyllis Schlafly once said the “flight from home is a flight from yourself, from responsibility, from the nature of woman.” As Goodman noted, Schlafly now says, “I think a hardworking, well-organized ceo type can handle it very well.”

Another telling comparison: At the 1992 Republican convention, Vice President Dan Quayle’s wife, Marilyn, said during her televised speech, “Most women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women. Most of us love being mothers or wives, which gives our lives a richness that few men or women get from professional accomplishments alone.” Stopping just short of calling “women’s liberation” a complete flop, Mrs. Quayle added, “Not everyone believed that the family was so oppressive that women could only thrive apart from it.”

Not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton called Quayle’s comments “an insult to today’s modern women.”

Sarah Palin is no Marilyn Quayle. “To any critics who say a woman can’t think and work and carry a baby at the same time, I’d just like to escort that Neanderthal back to the cave,” Palin told the Anchorage Daily News back in March when she revealed that she was seven months pregnant while still clocking in at the governor’s mansion every day (March 6).

The Left’s Sudden Embrace of Morality

Meanwhile, at the other end of the political spectrum, in a cynical attempt to score political points, the liberal intelligentsia became suddenly aware of—and gravely concerned about—the problems of promiscuous sex, teen pregnancy and the plight of working moms!

The New York Times—ever one to champion the role of motherhood above one’s career—said that many women greeted the news of Palin’s appointment with “incredulity.” The Times intoned, “Infants with Down syndrome often need special care in the first years of life: extra tests, physical therapy, even surgery” (September 1). The left-wing trendsetter also criticized Palin for accepting the vice presidential position since she knew in advance that it would immediately move her pregnant daughter under the intense glare of public scrutiny.

The Times also ran two front-page stories about the Bristol Palin pregnancy and implied that her mother should have never been given the nod when it reported that John McCain’s camp mistakenly failed to properly vet Palin before her appointment.

Yes, these same voices that have for decades urged mothers to abandon children for their careers, applauded women who choose single motherhood over marriage and that encouraged teenage sex so long as it’s “safe,” now all of a sudden are concerned about Sarah Palin’s family background.

Where have these warnings been the last 20 years even as the promiscuous sex they actively promote has brought about the rampant and deadly spread, primarily within the youth demographic, of sexually transmitted diseases?

stds kill people by the thousands every year, but this dangerous threat is largely unrecognized by the general public because it is ignored by educators, politicians and even health-care professionals. Many of them even put a positive spin on the plague by dishonestly pointing to the modest decline in the teen birthrate as surefire proof that contraceptives guarantee a safe and healthy lifestyle.

It’s no wonder the Democrats have found it so difficult to counterpunch John McCain’s appointment of Palin.

A Prophecy Fulfilled

Yes, both sides of the political aisle have their distorted views about family values. Meanwhile, the basic building block of a strong and stable society—the traditional family—continues to crumble.

Everything in our modern-day dysfunctional society is exactly as the Prophet Isaiah said it would be: upside down. This fact can mean only one thing, Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in his 1981 book The Missing Dimension in Sex: “[C]ivilization as we know it is on the way down—and out—unless that great ‘Unseen Strong Hand From Someplace’ soon intervenes and saves today’s sick society.”