Yeah, I Know. Sarah Palin's 17-Year-Old Daughter is Pregnant.

Wow. So. I feel obligated to post something about the Bristol Palin pregnancy story. Obligated, though certainly not excited. Another pregnant teenager from both a small town and a famous family, how unbelievably SHOCKING, let's all invade her business and her friends' MySpace pages and roll around naked in some luxurious judgment.

Mostly, I'm just trying to aim for coverage that's slightly less tacky than this:

That's a screengrab from US Magazine's website this morning, and...good God, really? Some of us had no damn clue who Sarah Palin even was before last Friday, and now they are BREAKING CELEBRITY NEWS?

(Although...what was that McCain commercial? About whether the "Biggest Celebrity in the World" was really ready to lead? Yikes.)

Of course, it's not just the tabloids having an wet hot aneurysm over five-months-pregnant 17-year-old Bristol Palin. The "real" media is already trying to mash this girl into some kind of poster child role for everything that's wrong with her mother's conservative views on abstinence-only education -- no matter how poorly researched or barely relevant that idea is (via Jezebel). Frankly, there's been entirely too much speculation (via Daily Kos) into the collective wombs of the Palin family this weekend.

And for the record, I attended a private, ultra-conservative Christian high school that taught young-Earth Creationism and abstinence-only sex-ed and world religious studies through the lens of Why Everybody Else Is Going To Hell Except Us. And I am now as idealogically far away from Sarah Palin as one can get. I could regale you with hours of anecdotes about the reckless, ignorant behavior that resulted from that limited educational experience, but...still. The coverage this morning is making me ill.

Bristol Palin is not a celebrity. She's not a poster child or a spokesperson or symbol for anything. She's a 17-year-old girl who is going to keep her baby and marry her boyfriend and I hope it's a choice that she's happy with and made for herself. I hope her mother gains some compassion and insight for other teenage girls who are not so lucky to come from privileged, stable, supportive families and might need to make a different choice and yeah, I doubt that'll happen but that's not Bristol's fault and...and...that's it. I'm out.