I’m very tired today after spending it all day out of the house for our first homeschool co-op of the year, so I will make this post short.

Regarding Palin’s teenage daughter being pregnant and planning a wedding…

Kudos to the family for walking the walk.  Being true to the pro-life cause means standing up for life even if means totally altering your life.  God created the universe to have natural consequences.  When animals mate, babies are made.  It’s natural.  It’s what happens.

Then man comes along these past fifty years and encourages teens to put off marriage until after college and/or grad school.  Because making lots of money — society’s definition of success — is more likely to happen to a person who completes college (hello, Michael Dell?  I don’t think they meant you.)  It used to be when teenagers were consumed with love and lust, they got married, and it was the norm.  A girl was an ‘old maid’ if she was sixteen and unmarried (way back in Scarlett O’Hara’s day and age).  Today’s teens are consumed with love and lust, and we tell them to abstain from marriage and physical love until they are older and wiser.

It’s no surprise, then, that so many teens end up unmarried and pregnant.  The bodies are ready to continue on the miracle of life, but social mores that say it’s too early to get married put a stigma on teens who decide to get married as well as a stigma on those who don’t get married but give in to the flesh.

God created marriage for a reason.  It’s a beautiful union and the perfect backdrop for intimacy.  When we stopped promoting marriage and started telling kids to wait until more important things like college degrees were obtained, they only partly followed our advice.  They waited for marriage but not for  the benefits of marriage.

I’m not advocating that all sixteen year old kids go out and get married.  But I do think society as a whole ought to look deeper into this unwed teenage pregnancy epidemic.  It touches all classes, all races, all people.  And if they did go out and get married, would be be better off as a society?  Would more of our kids have dads at home?  Would our kids learn more about responsibility?

No, I am not going to hold up Palin’s daughter as an example for all girls to follow.  But neither will I throw the first stone at her.  She’s getting married.  Her child will have a mother and a father.  Her child will have the gift of life.  Many girls in her position whose mothers are in public office would have quietly gotten an abortion, and no one would have known about it, except her.  But to stand up and announce the coming baby in such circumstances, knowing the media will be all over the story, takes a great deal of courage and is a testament to the quality of parenting Sarah Palin and her husband have done.  There is no doubt that this family values life over all else, even political campaigns.  It also takes a great deal of courage to stand up and say I Take Responsibility for this Child!  She and her new husband are growing up in a hurry, but it’s doable.  Many of our parents married young.  Mine married when my mother was 18, just a few months older than Palin’s daughter is now.  This year they will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary.

I have friends who married while they were in college.  Later on my friend confessed to me that they decided they had better get married quick before they started sinning!  If only more of us walked that way…

As for the baby who will make Palin a grandmother in the same year she became a mother, here’s what he or she will say, from Psalm 139:

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,

your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.

God himself ordains the days of every child who is created in the secret place.  That is why I celebrate life even in difficult circumstances.  Palin and her family don’t just talk the “pro-life” mantra.  They live it even in the midst of mainstream media finger-pointing and vicious internet rumors.