Slate's Weisberg: Abortion Essential to Family Values

Do you ever get the impression the liberal media disdain Gov. Sarah Palin not just because she's a strong conservative addition to the McCain ticket, but because she's a mother of five who practices the family values she preaches? I would submit that's a strong likelihood, at least in the case of Slate's Jacob Weisberg, who posits in the September 15 Newsweek that (emphases mine):

Palin's pro-life purism is as ethically flawed as it is politically damaging to the GOP. By vaunting their pro-life agenda over everything else, conservatives are abandoning one of their most valuable insights, that intact, two-parent families are best for children and the foundation of a healthy society.

Weisberg is so skeeved out by Gov. Palin's "purism" on abortion that he practically waxes nostalgic for the days of Vice President Dan Quayle:

About this, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bill Bennett, Gertrude Himmelfarb and, yes, Dan Quayle, were entirely correct. Remember Murphy Brown? I always thought the former vice president was on solid ground when he called it morally irresponsible to encourage women without the TV character's resources to embark on child rearing on their own. In today's GOP, Quayle wouldn't condemn Murphy Brown. He'd call her up to the stage and salute her for choosing life.

So let me get this straight. Palin is a bad social conservative because she doesn't value abortion as a remedy to single motherhood?!

Weisberg clearly doesn't get that the source of Palin's pro-life "purism" is grounded in her personal faith in Jesus Christ. Or perhaps he does, and that's what frightens him more than anything: a Republican whose pro-life values come not from calculated political expediency but a heart-felt belief in God.

Photoshop by David Lunde, via MichelleMalkin.com