Since I posted the cons and pros post below, I found out about the out-of-wedlock pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s teenaged daughter. Some of the things I wrote apply to this in principle (Con #1 and Pro #3), but please allow just a few quick takes on this new twist. Obviously, there will have to be more to come.
1. Given everything I have ever taught about child-rearing and covenant responsibility, this has to be taken as a familial failure, and not just a detached sin on the part of Bristol Palin. The basic responsibility for this, however, lies with her father. Clearly in some way she was not getting the love, protection, and accountability that she and her boyfriend needed. If her mother’s outside responsibilities were part of the set-up (as they very well could have been), then it was Todd Palin’s responsibility to address that.
2. The qualifications for elder are not the same as the qualifications to hold political office.
3. I would be reluctant to automatically assume that the nature of the family failure was Sarah Palin’s involvement in politics. Could have been, but not necessarily. I have been a pastor for thirty-one years, and I have seen quite a few girls who were needy buckets who came from homes where dad and mom were more than acceptably Traditional.
4. We ought not to defend in a conservative candidate what we would attack in a radical candidate. Equal weights and measures.
Enough for now. More later.