Via Adrianne and Mac, I found an interesting article about an Alabama Catholic school that tried to stop a young lady from walking at graduation because she was pregnant. There is little that I can say that those two and Kathy the Cake Eater haven't about the incident, except to say that I'm a bit more perturbed about the sexism than their making the perfect the enemy of the good. That Catholics see the moral glass as half-empty and that they are not willing to compromise one "evil" (premarital sex) to avoid a greater "evil" (abortion) is reasonably well documented.

But the fact that they let the child's father walk makes it pretty certain that they are at best insincere and at worst... something worst. I think it's a combination of both. It doesn't seem that there was any doubt that he was the father, or at least that he was doing certain sinful things that could make him a father. In either case, it takes two to tango. I tend to get frustrated when the response to unwanted fatherhood is "he should have thought of that before he had sex" and the response to unwanted motherhood is "she should still have a choice" and the continued notion that pregnancy is something that a man does to a woman rather than something they do together, but this is no less infuriating. In fact, given that she's kept the baby (and thus done the rightest thing she could in the Catholic moral code under the circumstances), and we don't know for sure that the guy that was allowed to walk would, it infuriates me a bit more.

Which brings me to the point that Adrianne, Mac, and Kathy all made, though Adrianne went the farthest in to, at some point you've gotta try and see the moral glass as being half-full. Sometimes, I believe, what you do about your sins once they're committed says as much about your character as how many you commit. Though I do understand the Catholic point-of-view that they're not bound to bend to the mores of contemporary society. I understand, but I'm not Catholic and those two facts are not completely unrelated.