The Intellectual Slavishness of Mallick Worship

"Nothing wrong here", says Unrepentant Old Hippie

As the Mighty Wind of outrage sweeps through the United States and Canada concerning Heather Mallick and her extremely intemperate and, frankly, loonish comments regarding American Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, it's unsurprising that a few members of Canada's extreme left is lining up alongside her in the impending scrum.

Among them, naturally, is Unrepentant Old Hippie JJ, who thinks there's nothing at all wrong with Mallick's extreme commentary, and that so-called right-wing "moonbats" are simply milking "fauxtrage".

However, what JJ in particular seems to miss is the impliations of Mallick's comments on her own personal pet cause -- the pro-abortion lobby.

Now, as with all intellectually dishonest pro-abortion lobbyists, JJ will be among the first to insist that she isn't, in fact, pro-abortion. Instead, she insists, she's pro-choice -- and yet, under the "wrong" circumstances will actually oppose choice and refuse to answer qeustions about that.

Yet when one takes a close second look at Mallick's comments about the much-maligned Briston Palin, it doesn't take a drastic intellectual leap of faith to understand the broader implications:

"Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by this decade's woman, the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression. Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the "pramface." Husband Todd looks like a roughneck; Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified. They claim to be family obsessed while being studiously terrible at parenting. What normal father would want Levi "I'm a fuckin' redneck" Johnson prodding his daughter?

I know that I have an attachment to children that verges on the irrational, but why don't the Palins? I'm not the one preaching homespun values but I'd destroy that ratboy before I'd let him get within scenting range of my daughter again, and so would you.

...

Who delivered this line: "To do then now would be retro. To do then then was very now-tro, if you will." Was it Rev. James Dobson of Focus on the Family talking about Bristol Palin's shotgun wedding or was it a flashback to the Kingston Trio?"

It's not too hard to get the gist of Mallick's comments: Palin's relationship with the equally-maligned Levi Johnson is a disgrace, and the pregnancy resulting from it doubly so.

Never mind the fact that Mallick -- and those who, like her, are delighting themselves in throwing darts at what they've picked out as a vulnerable bullseye -- have never actually met Levi Johnson, and are extremely ill-equipped to judge his character.

Yet the question that remains is this: if Bristol Palin were to do what individuals such as Mallick seem to insist that she should and break off her relationship with Johnson -- again, something that these people actually know very little about, aside that a teen pregnancy has resulted from it -- what would be her alternatives?

This is a very simple question to answer: single parenthood, or an abortion.

Either way, Bristol Palin would spend a significant portion of her life carrying the very real stigma that still accompanies single teenaged parenthood: in short, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

If Palin were decide to keep that child, she would face numerous disadvantages -- economically and socially. Whether individuals like Mallick or JJ care to admit it or not, society still tends to treat unwed teenage mothers as "tramps", "sluts", "whores", or any number of other epithets. This stigma encompasses nearly every facet of the young mother's life, both economically and socially.

Worse yet, after the child is born and continues to grow through their school years, that stigma will begin to attach itself to the child, instead.

Then, of course, there's an alternative: abortion. Once again, after having recieved an abortion, the young woman would still carry a very similar label. She would still be regarded as a "tramp", "slut" or "whore", and would actually have to double that with the "baby killer" epithet that the more extreme elements of the anti-abortion lobby would inevitably heave upon her.

The difference, of course, being, that at least after having had an abortion, the young woman in question could at least move somewhere else to escape that stigma (unless, of course, you're living under a media microscope, as Bristol Palin is).

While gleefully rushing to label Bristol's mother as a "toned down porn star", Mallick doesn't seem interested in coming to Bristol Palin's defense, as she's labelled a "slut" in a very public manner.

Defeating the public stigma surrounding teenage pregnancy would go a long way toward empowering young women like Bristol Palin to keep their babies without keeping their (actual or alleged) "ratboy" boyfriends.

But Mallick seems very disinterested in that. Especially not when there are partisan political points to be scored -- in a foreign country, no less -- by helping pile it on.

It would take very little for Heather Mallick -- or JJ, for that matter -- to do the right thing by coming out and admitting that Bristol Palin's pregnancy is a private matter, and not a political football to kick around. Instead, we find JJ fetching Mallick the kicking tee in the extremely fickle name of pissing off some "wingnuts".

In Mallick's view, Bristol Palin is a "pramface", her fiancee a "ratboy", soon to be joined in a "shotgun wedding". "White trash", all around. A "slutty", "trampy", "whorish" "Alaskan Hillbilly".

There is, of course, the matter of thousands of other unwed teenaged mothers-to-be in the Unites States, likely taking note of the public humiliation being heaped on Bristol Palin and her family and thinking that an abortion is a much more attractive option than socially stigmatized single parenthood.

And JJ and Heather Mallick, north of the 49th parrallel, fiddling while their alleged "pro-choice" Rome burns to the ground.

They certainly insist that they don't favour abortion, and would prefer that women seek out other options. The other option, however, involves a great deal of social hardship -- and when the one who would suffer such hardship happens to be the daughter of an ideological enemy, all bets are off.

On a fairly similar vein, there's always Martin Rayner and his insistence that "well, other people are doing it, too".

Which doesn't make it any more acceptable, and one can expect that Bill Maher will be taken to task for his comments in time as well.

Then, there's the naturally-emerging protest that "well, the other guys do it, too!" Likely that's what Mallick herself meant when she told herself to "think like a Republican".

The problem with this being that dragging Bristol Palin through the mud in order to get at her mother is no less wrong than right-wing activists targetting the families of their political opponents. (No intellectually honest individual could pretend that such things have never happened.) And while it's abhorrent when right-wingers do it, it's equally abhorrent when left-wingers like Mallick do it.

Which, of course, takes one away from the point: when one considers all the social implications of Mallick's attitude toward Bristol Palin, it actually turns out that her comments regarding Sarah Palin are only the tip of the iceberg.

That's the irony of the entire affair: slavish Mallick worshippers, claiming to be feminists, lining up against the interests of legitimate feminism.