Introduction Strategies
“Red Sex, Blue Sex”
“Supporting Girls and Boys…”
“Do Immigrants Make Us Safer?”
In early September, when Sarah Palin,
the Republican candidate for Vice-President,
announced that her unwed seventeen-yearold daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many
liberals were shocked, not by the revelation
but by the reaction to it. They expected the
news to dismay the evangelical voters that
John McCain was courting with his choice of
Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the
Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted
dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or
even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from
Louisiana told CBS News, “Like so many
other American families who are in the same
situation, I think it’s great that she instilled in
her daughter the values to have the child and
not to sneak off someplace and have an
abortion.” A Mississippi delegate claimed
that “even though young children are making
that decision to become pregnant, they’ve
also decided to take responsibility for their
actions and decided to follow up with that
and get married and raise this child.” Palin’s
family drama, delegates said, was similar to
the experience of many socially conservative
Christian families. As Marlys Popma, the
head of evangelical outreach for the McCain
campaign, told National Review, “There
hasn’t been one evangelical family that
hasn’t gone through some sort of situation.”
In fact, it was Popma’s own “crisis
pregnancy” that had brought her into the
movement in the first place.
During the campaign, the media has
largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s
pregnancy as a private matter. But the
reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift
that mirrors America’s dominant political
divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue
states” tend to support sex education and are
not particularly troubled by the idea that
many teen-agers have sex before marriage,
but would regard a teen-age daughter’s
pregnancy as devastating news. And the
social conservatives in “red states” generally
advocate abstinence-only education and
denounce sex before marriage, but are
relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes
pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to
have an abortion.
Until recently, many children who did
not conform to gender norms in their
clothing or behavior and identified
intensely with the opposite sex were
steered to psychoanalysis or behavior
modification.
Although the midterm election failed to
render a clear verdict on illegal
immigration, the new Democratic Congress
may enact sweeping legislation tightening
border controls and allowing more guest
workers next year. If that happens, the
rancorous debate about how undocumented
workers affect jobs and wages in the United
States will be rejoined. So, too, will an
equally rancorous, if less prominent, debate:
Do immigrants make the U.S. more crimeridden and dangerous?
But as advocates gain ground for what
they call gender-identity rights,
evidenced most recently by New York
City's decision to let people alter the sex
listed on their birth certificates, a major
change is taking place among schools
and families. Children as young as 5 who
display predispositions to dress like the
opposite sex are being supported by a
growing number of young parents,
educators and mental health
professionals.
In an age of Latino gangs and Chinese
criminal networks, the notion that
communities with growing immigrant
populations tend to be unsafe is fairly well
established, at least in the popular
imagination. In a national survey conducted
in 2000, 73 percent of Americans said they
believe that immigrants are either
''somewhat'' or ''very'' likely to increase
crime, higher than the 60 percent who fear
they are ''likely to cause Americans to lose
jobs.'' Cities like Avon Park, Fla., have
considered ordinances recently to dissuade
businesses from hiring illegal immigrants,
whose presence ''destroys our
neighborhoods.'' Even President Bush,
whose perceived generosity to
undocumented workers has earned him
vilification on the right, commented in a
speech this May that illegal immigration
''strains state and local budgets and brings
crime to our communities.''
So goes the conventional wisdom. But is
it true?