A version of this ran in The Virginian-Pilot on September 3, 2008.

ST. PAUL, MINN.

IS THERE A RULE somewhere that the teenage children of political candidates must be virgins?

No?

Then let's stop heaping humiliation on a 17-year-old Alaskan girl who's having a baby. Bristol Palin's condition - and her decision not to seek an abortion - has nothing to do with the presidential race, nor is it a reflection on her mother, who joined the Republican ticket last week.

A teenager had sex. Sheesh. Stop the presses.

No sooner did it become clear that New Orleans had avoided a Katrina-like calamity than cable newscasters turned their attention from storm stories to Sarah Palin's daughter.

On Tuesday, The New York Times stuck three articles related to the Palin pregnancy on its front page.

This interest in the Palin family drama smacks of voyeurism. The gleeful press corps, which can't stop feasting on this family's situation, has forgotten that at the heart of this juicy story is a vulnerable young girl. She didn't commit a crime. She didn't seek publicity.

"Kids don't ask their parents to go into politics," noted Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell, the father of five, ages 16 to 27 . "There's not a parent out there that hasn't had a challenge with a teenager.

"I have to give credit to Barack Obama, who said yesterday that kids are off-limits. He's exactly right. They should be."

It's worth noting that the same news organizations that slapped the gynecological condition of this minor on their front pages fiercely protect the privacy of juvenile murderers.

I find that odd.

Worse, listening to grown men and women with press passes dangling from their necks giggle about a young girl's mistake has only served to highlight the arrested development of some of my fellow writer s.

The most charitable explanation for this feeding frenzy would be a slow news cycle. Only there isn't a news drought.

So a less charitable explanation - and one we're hearing from irate Republicans in the Twin Cities - is that members of the media are so deeply in the tank for the Democrats that they'll gladly sacrifice a kid to torpedo the GOP ticket.

"Using a 17-year-old girl to suggest that Sen. John McCain did not vet his vice president … is disgusting," said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster who met with the Virginia delegation Tuesday.

She said Palin's political opponents were pushing the story because they assumed that family-values voters would disapprove of the girl's behavior.

"They simply don't understand Christians," Conway said.

The Washington Post's Sally Quinn seized on the pregnancy to suggest that Sarah Palin might be too distracted by five children - including an infant with Down syndrome - to carry out her duties.

When was the last time anyone suggested a man was unfit for office because he had five kids?

Fact is, the vice presidential job is the one that John Nance Garner supposedly described as not worth "a pitcher of warm spit."

About what these pregnancy stories are worth.