Don’t you remember the good old days? When women were subordinate to men, back-alley abortions were prevalent, irate husbands slammed down their after-work martinis and then threw their wives down the stairs like a rag doll? Oh yes, and remember when we used to shame women who had children out of wedlock or went to planned parenthood clinics? Those were the good old days of personal responsibility!

Sound ridiculous? Good — it should — but we still have some people on the bandwagon of the”pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-or-you’re-yesterday’s-trash” mentality. In fact, we have one of them who works right here as Director of Development for the University of Wisconsin Foundation in the business school: his name is Jim Kubek.

Mr. Kubek, who wrote an opinion piece in the Wisconsin State Journal titled “Beware of enabling poor choices,” is frustrated there are some alternative high schools in the area that have babysitting programs for teens who’ve had children out of wedlock. He writes in his piece, “a little more than a generation ago, my cousin had a child out of wedlock. Back then it was a disgrace; now it gets you on the front page of the local paper.”

You see, Mr. Kubek is appalled that, in light of the $8.6 million budget shortfall, we would want to keep women who may have made a mistake in school. Apparently, Jim Kubek would rather have these women have abortions. Or maybe he would just rather have them pick themselves up by their bootstraps, stay home with the children, not get an education and then be on welfare for the rest of their lives. Hmm, sounds like this is a deeply compassionate man.

He goes on to write that because we have these alternative high schools that provide teen mothers a chance to get an education, “the real problem is that by providing venues such as these, we are enabling and possibly encouraging bad choices and a lack of personal responsibility.” For some reason I’ve never known a woman who has said, “Damn, if I could do high school all over again I’d love to pop out a couple of kids because then I could be cleaning up their diapers and going to school at the same time!” I’m sure that Mr. Kubek never made any mistakes in his childhood, but that’s beside the point.

I think the most outrageous thing he said was that it used to be a “disgrace” to have a child out of wedlock. Isn’t that nice? You see I don’t believe that any woman is a disgrace who has a child, period. And I’m sure that Jimmy would never be tough enough to go tell these women having babies in high school they are a disgrace.

Although he lives in a pretty nice, upper-middle class home, most of the women that have had these kids out of wedlock happen to be in the lower socioeconomic classes. I know this because my mother works as a social worker at an alternative high school in Middleton, where she deals with these women on a day-to-day basis. But maybe the lower socioeconomic women just don’t count.

There are too many people who call themselves compassionate conservatives but on the other hand are extreme moralists. They think they are compassionate conservatives because they want to give money to faith-based groups but they get mad when their tax dollars go to a public school system that is doing something both compassionate and conservative. It’s compassionate for helping girls who may have made a mistake and it’s conservative because it’s giving them an opportunity to preserve life, carry their babies to full-term and stay in school.

Mr. Kubek is a Middleton native like myself and I happen to know him personally. He is a fellow Catholic and goes to church quite frequently. When I go to church this weekend I’ll be praying for all women in the world, including the ones who’ve had children out of wedlock, because they aren’t any less perfect than the rest of us. After all, no pregnant woman is a disgrace. And by the way, I’ll be praying for Mr. Kubek too.

Casey Hoff ([email protected]) is a UW student and the host of “New Ground with Casey Hoff,” live Monday through Friday, 9-11 a.m., on Talk Radio 1670 WTDY.