The Falls-Church News Press extracts this fun fact from the recent New Yorker piece, “The Insiders: How John McCain Came to Pick Sarah Palin,” by Jane Mayer:

Two prominent Falls Church members among those who voted to defect from the Episcopal Church in 2006 played a major role in promoting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be selected as the GOP vice presidential candidate . . .

Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard magazine, and Michael Gerson, former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush and a Washington Post columnist, were among two groups of arch-conservatives who visited Gov. Palin in Alaska in the summer of 2007, bringing back to Washington, D.C. rave reviews of the then barely known governor as potential v-p material.

Both Barnes and Gerson are high-profile members of the so-called Falls Church Anglican, the name the defecting members gave themselves after voting to leave the Episcopal Church in December 2006.

Margaret Talbot has a wonderful piece out in The New Yorker about the political and social divides between liberal and conservative conceptions of teen pregnancy. Writes Talbot:

Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

I think this speaks to one commonality between the two sets of parents: They get upset when their kids prove their own values wrong. For a blue-stater who supports pre-marital sex, a child becoming pregnant or contracting an S.T.D. shows that contraception methods are not infallible, and forces the parent to come to terms with what her kid is actually doing behind closed doors. For a red-stater who opposes contraception, a child becoming pregnant provides a less permanent reality check: once the pregnancy is aired, the parent can rationalize the situation back into their world-view by saying that her child is in love, engaged, and will raise her own baby as a gift from God. Blue-staters without God to look back on probably just have to bite the bullet.