Family Values

New commenter Merge Divide thinks that Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy negates the McCain/Palin play for the family values vote. I clumsily tried to explain why it’s really not that big a deal to the family values set that she’s having the baby, but Rod Dreher did a much better job of it over at his joint. Money grafs:

It is difficult to strongly stigmatize unwed parenthood on the one hand, but then when you find out that a teenager is pregnant, decline to stigmatize her, and in fact rush to help her. That seems illogical. It is, rationally speaking, contradictory. Conservatives are fond of saying that what you tolerate, you encourage. Are we not encouraging teen pregnancy by failing to condemn Bristol Palin?

There is that possibility, of course. But for Christians, at least, there is this thing called grace. Sex outside of marriage is morally wrong. It should especially be stigmatized for teenagers. But humans are weak and fallible, and they sin. Bristol Palin and the father of her baby sinned, and sinned seriously. Because of what they did, another human life came to be. Love has its own logic, and that logic commands us to love that unborn baby, and to love her mother through this crisis. It does not mean that what Bristol and the baby’s father did was right, or trivial. It means only that the most important thing now is to help this young woman — this young couple — redeem the situation they’ve gotten themselves into.

Since he’s more in tune with that group of voters, you’re much better off reading his take than mine. Check out the whole thing if you have a minute.