Sarah Palin scares the shit out of me; however:

her daughter's pregnancy has nothing to do with it.

I'll admit that I made a few uninformed and thoughtless comments about this situation initially, but the more I've thought about it, the worse I've felt about having said anything.

Bristol Palin's pregnancy doesn't necessarily say anything about Sarah Palin's parenting. Kids do things they shouldn't, and they make mistakes despite their parents' guidance all the time. And sometimes those 'mistakes' are devastating, sometimes they have little impact, and sometimes, in retrospect, they end up being the best thing that could have ever happened.

I know nothing about Sarah Palin as a mother, and I don't really see how that has anything to do with her as a politician. A person's successes or failures in one of their roles in life doesn't necessarily say anything about their potential successes and failures in another. Sarah Palin may be a wonderful mother. She may not be. She appears to really love her children, and she and her husband appear to be supporting their daughter as she deals with the difficult situation with which she has been confronted.

There are, however, a lot of things about Sarah Palin that make me extremely uncomfortable (including but not limited to her belief that human beings have not impacted global warming, her opposition to listing the polar bear as an endangered species, her ties to the oil industry, her stance on drilling in ANWR, her apparent opposition to pay equity legislation, her support for overturning Roe v. Wade, her support of abstinence-only sex education, her stance on marriage equality, the investigations into her alleged abuse of power in the firing of three people while mayor of Wassila and governor of Alaska, her apparent ignorance of foreign policy, and her potential proximity to the role of President of the United States should the unfortunate event that the McCain/Palin ticket is victorious in November occur.)

I know my thoughts on this issue don't really matter, but since I'd made a few cracks earlier today, I felt like I needed to apologize for having said those things and explain a bit of my thought process in coming to my current frame of mind.