In response to the news that Sarah Palin’s seventeen-year-old daughter Bristol is five months pregnant, Barack Obama took the high road, saying, “This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president.” He stated further that he would fire any staff member caught spreading malicious rumors about the Palin family.

Fair enough.

What I think is fair game, however, are Gov. Palin’s stances on abortion and sex education. Her anti-abortion stance was one of the things that got her on the GOP ticket. In 2006 she stated that she would oppose it even if her own daughter had been raped. In the same ’06 survey she responded that she while she approved of abstinence-only sex education, “explicit” sex-ed programs would not receive her support. I think Obama would agree that we all need to be aware of Gov. Palin’s opinions on these issues so that we as voters can make an informed decision. And I think the current situation with the governor’s own family is relevant to our decision-making.

I assume (and perhaps this is a mistake) that the policies she advocates from her office are the same choices with which she educates her own family. If that is the case, I think we can agree that providing children with nothing but abstinence-only sex education has a pretty lousy success rate. And while the decision has been made (by whom we do not know) for Bristol Palin to have the baby, why is it also deemed necessary for the girl to marry the baby’s father? How often does that work?

A little less than a year ago Lynne Spears had a deal to write a book on motherhood. Then her seventeen-year-old daughter Jamie Lynn announced that she was pregnant, and that particular book deal went away.

I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.