Pastor's Puddle

I guess I wasn't quite done with Part 2, so I will do a quick Part 3.

"Blue families" are also more likely to make church part of their lives.  The "wait until you are married to have children" still holds strong for a significant segment of our population, at least in practice.  And that ethic is working quite well for those who practice it.  Before contraception was widely acceptable, wait until you are married meant don't have sex until you are married.  Now it means, if you have sex, be careful.

Can we agree on wait to have children until you are married as a sexual ethic?  It seems we have a consensus around this as a practice, but are we willing to teach it, and encourage others outside the church to live by it?  The irony in Red Families v. Blue Families is that blue families were happy to live by this ethic, and enjoy its privileges, but reluctant to claim it as normative in any way, or suggest that others should live by it.  But isn't this a form of, "I'm not responsible for them, they will have to make their own choices and live by them," one of the hallmarks of contemporary conservative arguments?

I want to say goodbye to this topic with a caveat.  Families are complex, and take many different shapes and sizes for many different reasons.  Single men and women choose to adopt.  A variety of events can make parents single parents.  These posts in no way are meant to ignore or dismiss the challenges of single parenting, nor its importance.  At the end of the day, parenting is hard, and its best not to take it on without lots of help.