John McCain ruled last night, but Sarah Palin dominates this morning’s N&R opinion page.

Cal Thomas, whose grandmother “thought it demonstrated poor breeding to say the words ‘toilet paper’ in public,” is astounded at “at the rush to judgment by so many in the media, a media that promotes what it then quickly decries”:

When news breaks that the daughter of a Republican political figure is pregnant out of wedlock, the media quickly return to our Puritan roots and seek to hold certain people (usually conservatives) to a moral standard that culture has abandoned.

But, of all people, the N&R’s own Rosemary Roberts struck a chord with me:

For the moment, Palin has tempered the uproar about her unmarried 17-year-old daughter. Her family, including the boyfriend who fathered the child, appeared on the convention stage to rousing applause. If the GOP faithful felt uncomfortable with this complicated family tableau, they suppressed it.

Honestly, I was uncomfortable with that scene myself. My moral center on that subject is Dr. Laura Schlesinger, who consistently takes calls from young women who are pregnant out of wedlock but assure her that they’re going to marry their boyfriends, as soon as wedding plans are complete. Dr. Laura doesn’t buy it, asking why they didn’t immediately go to the justice of the peace and get married when they found out they were expecting a child. Such action would show true committment to each other and their unborn child, she reasons.

I thought the same thing about Bristol Palin and her fiance. I don’t judge them for conceiving a child out of wedlock, and I’m glad they plan to marry. But to show them off on stage was in effect an endorsement of out-of-wedlock pregancy and definitely sent the wrong message.

Update: I hadn’t heard Dr. Laura comment on Sarah Palin, but she blogged about it:

I’m stunned – couldn’t the Republican Party find one competent female with adult children to run for Vice President with McCain? I realize his advisors probably didn’t want a “mature” woman, as the Democrats keep harping on his age. But really, what kind of role model is a woman whose fifth child was recently born with a serious issue, Down Syndrome, and then goes back to the job of Governor within days of the birth?

But she’ll still vote for McCain.