The Mama Grizzly Smack-down: Moore-Benning, Less Palin
The kids are alright. The kids are alright. The kids are alright. Sarah Palin doesn’t need a bridge to anywhere, a flute or a moose. Just a $10 ticket to the movie theater (for the film The Kids are Alright) and she’ll find a couple of kids better adjusted than her own. She’d best take notes.
Self-proclaimed right wing “Mama Grizzly” Palin has met her matches. Julianne Moore and Annette Benning have given the world a two hour tutorial on the real world—a world with real teenage children and real adults struggling through life together. Sarah might field dress caribou, but on the grizzly grading scale, the lesbo movie mamas win by a mile.
They could, and should, teach Parenting 101 to Caribou Barbie. Contrast these gritty brave mothers to the self important ex-Governor Grizzly, who resigns her gubernatorial post mid stream to sign with Fox and make gazillions of greedy/ grizzly dollars. To answer the question “Who put the you in values (for the dollar)?” look no further than Sarah.
All the while her daughter’s baby daddy makes the rounds (dressed and undressed) talking Palin trash—most of it specific, and specifically unflattering to Grandma Greedy/Grizzly. Daughter Bristol, meanwhile, goes on the speaking circuit, preaching abstinence with her baby, aptly named Tripp, on her lap. Baby Daddy Levi proposes marriage and then unproposes (again) when a woman named Briana Plum (you can’t make that one up) entered the scene saying she, too, had a little Levi! What a Tripp.
The child’s life is bound to be...um, grizzly...dragged as he will be from Right wing side shows to reality TV shows, and of course to the Republican National Convention for “family night” on stage every four years.
And her own employer, Fox News is worried that gay people will screw up the kids. Someone grab grandma a mirror.
The Prop 8 decision came down just about the time Levi was about to offer Bristol what seemed like Prop 9—another proposal that starts with calling Us magazine (yes, it seems the “value for the dollar” gene did pass from generation to generation). This little on-again off-again marriage proposal drama is a cruel backdrop for 36,000 Californians who had made the decision (many of them seniors after spending decades together) to tie the knot. It is the Palin T-Party brigade that voted Prop 8 in and our marriages out. 18,000 couples who said yes were told no by voters. Meanwhile, a straight kid with a propensity for undressing in public and dropping out of school, impregnates a governor’s daughter and then proceeds to flip flop daily on proposing marriage—an act so cavalier it flies in the face of grizzly injustice. 18,000 wedding bands are being slipped on and off by forces beyond gay couples control. But, Levi gets to call his own shots.
All this is played out in technicolor in front of a toddler named Tripp who will certainly be on an analyst’s couch once Grandma Grizzly retires from her family (and dollar) values tour. And here’s where the grizzly hypocrisy boils over. The judge in the Prop 8 decision had to strike down and fend off every blatant lie and prejudiced attempt to tarnish the children of gay families. The judge was a Reagan-Bushie, and the lawyers, true esquires, Boies and Olson, reached across a bipartisan marriage aisle from opposite sides of the Bush-Gore contest. Those are some bi-partisan pride bona fides.
The movie mamas make the case even better. You get the sense that if their teenage daughter were pregnant, they’d find a way to deal with the grizzly details honestly and openly—together, as a family. No leveraging a Fox News contract and taking $100K per speech. No baby daddy baring it all for Playgirl, and then his heart on Oprah. No magazine contracts for lurid access. Nope. For the duo of mama grizzlies, it’s just hard work and commitment.
Except it isn’t just hard work and commitment for us gay people. First, it’s coming out. Then it’s finding some self esteem if you’re lucky—and then your voice if your luckier still. It’s worrying about rejection and judgment and prejudice 24/7—a prejudice fabricated by lies and perpetrated by Rush Limbaugh (4 wives) Newt Gingrich (3) and Karl Rove (2). Together with the grizzliest of grandmas they will try to use Prop 8 to turn the nation crimson red this fall. And so, before even thinking parenthood responsibilities, we gay folk have to fight the backlash tooth and nail to save our homo hides once again.
So ask any gay parent if, after all that, carpooling isn’t a cinch.
Brent Mundt resides in Washington, DC but lives in Rehoboth Beach.