A study that's set to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Reproductive Health which indicates that religious communities tend to produce higher teen birth rates is prompting the usual nonsense from the usual quarters. Former Washington Times editor Robert Stacy McCain, for instance, finds it suspicious that a journal on reproductive health would publish a paper on a matter of reproductive health; clearly, an ulterior motive is at work:
The objective of this study? To convince college-educated middle-class people that religious faith is the No. 1 force for evil in the modern world. "OMG! If we let our daughter go to church, kiss Vassar good-bye!"
Like everyone associated with the Washington Times, McCain knows that each and every study resulting in data that could be potentially inconvenient in relation to the tenets of scattershot conservatism are conceived and implemented in service to atheistic materialism, which is how he is able to discern the politics and character of any researcher in the world with just a cursory glance at a third-party summary of their yet-to-be-released paper. He is a very talented fellow. I'm going to stop being sarcastic for a second here even though refraining from sarcasm in a situation such as this causes me actual physical pain.
McCain takes a risky approach to dismissing the findings as not only politically-motivated, but also irrelevant -- he actually gives us an example of a woman who found herself pregnant at the age of 13, this being Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor. The fact that a member of the royal family of England had a son who did something swell, he implies, indicates that teen pregnancy is no big problem, because, hey, Henry Tudor.
My four or five regular readers will not be surprised that I have taken the liberty of Googling around a bit to see what The Other McCain actually thinks about teen pregnancy when he's not trying to downplay its importance in defense of the religious. And anyone familiar with people like McCain will be similarly not-so-astonished to learn that he does indeed worry about teen pregnancy rates when it is black and Hispanic mothers who are getting pregnant, having scolded the New York Times for not sufficiently highlighting the "demographics" of a study on the subject done just last year. Of course, there are "demographics," and then there are "demographics." Likewise, there are "respectable commentators," and then there are "people who used to serve as editors at the shittiest national paper in the country."
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