This time, allow me to be the 100,000 . . .

. . . blogger to comment on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol. I was going to write a post about how the left is wrong that this will sink Palin, and that they are wrong because their view of Christians is so warped. But Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom has already put it so succinctly (emphasis mine):

Many on the left will believe, quite mistakenly, that such an announcement is likely to weaken Palin’s support among “the hard-right conservative base”. But in fact, it will do no such thing — first, because the “hard-right conservative base” that liberal Democrats consistently invoke is largely a caricature that lives only in their minds and as a convenient trope in their rhetoric, from whence it can be trotted out as a foil and a boogeyman on cue[.]

I’ve seen anecdotal evidence of how a church reacts to difficult situations like this. One of the unwed pregnancies at my old church, which was pretty darn conservative culturally and theologically, was the Pastor’s daughter. Granted, she was no longer a teenager and she was living on her own, but she was still very young. Did we run the pastor out on a rail? No. We prayed for his family, especially his daughter, and rejoiced with him when the child was born.

His daughter eventually married the father. According to the leftist charicature, this also should have outraged the congregation, for the pastor’s daughter is white and the baby’s father is black. Horrors! An immediate stoning, perhaps? No, widely felt gratitude that the child now has a complete, loving family around it.

Shocking, I know.

UPDATE (9/4/08)

My wife corrects my mistake about the father.  Not black, but some minority that would make this a “mixed marriage” of sorts.