Words Mean Things with Analicia

Say what you will about Bristol Palin, she’s a quick study. It didn’t take her long to master the ways of her elders on the censorious right and decide that personal circumstance and past error needn’t prevent someone from claiming righteous leadership. Uncle Rush must be proud.

Soon after President Obama stated support for same-sex marriage, Bristol publicly weighed in. Because, you know, the world was on tenterhooks.

In a blog post she focused on the reference that Obama made to his daughters — and to the same-sex parents of some of the girls’ friends.

“It would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends (sic) parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage,” wrote Bristol, making her heady debut as the new Dr. Spock for a nascent millennium. She added that “in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview.”

Fathers like … Levi Johnston? It’s with him that she conceived her child — out of wedlock, at the age of 17 — and by most accounts, his relationship with her and the Palin family isn’t any warmer than Juneau in January. A mother/father home is not what he and Bristol have succeeded in creating.

What’s more, she has made sure that their son, Tripp, will at some point be treated to a worldview-shaping image of Dad as something akin to a date rapist. That’s the description of him immortalized in her memoir, one of her many efforts to monetize her surname. It recounts the loss of her virginity as a result of getting drunk and blacking out in the company of Levi, who pounced. What a gift that narrative is to Tripp, now being hauled into a TV reality show, “Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp,” already in production. Little children are known to thrive in such environments.

I hesitated before picking on Bristol because she’s an easy target. It’s like shooting moose from a helicopter flying low over the tundra.

But she so perfectly distills the double standards and audacity of so many of our country’s self-appointed moralists and supposed traditionalists: hypocrites whose own histories, along with any sense of shame, tumble out the window as soon as there’s a microphone to be seized or check to be cashed.

On the bully attack of the boy with the bleached-blond hair, Romney issued a standard political non-apology, chuckling at first, saying he couldn’t remember what he called “high jinks,” but also not denying the incident.

Asked to clarify, he went into weasel mode. “I don’t remember them all, but again, high school days, if I did stupid things, why I’m afraid I’ve got to say I’m sorry for it,” he said on Fox News Radio, the corporate couch for Republicans who need a reassuring hug in a bad moment.

Still, Romney said he could remember one thing: the boy, John Lauber, who was pinned down and had his hair cut by force, was certainly not considered a homosexual, no sir. Not in those days. “That was the furthest thing from my mind back in the 1960s,” Romney said, in elaborating with Fox.

This is where it gets maddening. First, his explanation is not credible. One of the witnesses, Phillip Maxwell, said to the Times, “Certainly, for the other people that were involved, nobody has forgotten.” Second, what Romney seems to be implying — that bullying of effeminate-seeming boys didn’t happen in prep schools in the 1960s — is preposterous.

Romney could have just owned up to the takedown of the kid, as the other assailants did, and said he has grown as a man. He could use this episode to tell a version of his own story: how an annoying little rich kid became a thoughtful leader who wants to be inclusive. Or he could have used it as another way to explain the positive influence of his wife on him as he matured.

On same-sex marriage, Romney has shown a similar kind of willful amnesia. Over the weekend, Romney assured his commencement audience at Liberty University that marriage has long been, and will always be defined as “a relationship between one man and one woman.”

Except, in the case of his great-grandfather Miles P. Romney, whose idea of marriage was between one man and five women. Or his great-great grandfather Parley Pratt, one man who married twelve women.

Call them sexual outlaws, Biblical originalists, or just guys who liked a renewable supply of young women, but Romney’s not-so-long-ago ancestors were anything but practitioners of the kind of marriage Romney claims has been enshrined since the dawn of civilization.

He could use his background to say that even his own family strayed from the true intent of marriage, and that modern Romneys evolved on the issue, to become the devoted monogamists we see today. But instead, he acts as if polygamy – an audacious experiment that nearly brought the United States to a second Civil War, this one in the West — never existed, in his family or his faith.

We look to leaders to be bold and to go against the grain every now and then. When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student, “a slut” and “a prostitute” for advocating basic contraceptive health care, the party’s leading demagogue was condemned – in a rare break – by many Republicans. But not by Romney.

Romney said Limbaugh’s slander of the young woman “is not the language I would have used.” The language he did use, then, was weasel-speak.