The Beast With Red Cheeks

Megan joins the debate:

I have unashamedly moved in with a boyfriend, and am still not ashamed.  But if we think people should marry, and shouldn't cohabit, then shame is a much better way to get there than giving people stupid marriage classes, paying them to get married, or making it illegal for unmarried people to rent an apartment.

So does Ross:

...the battle between social conservatism and social liberalism at the moment isn't a battle between competing utopias, but a battle over which tragic choice is worse: The choice to stigmatize, which can damage and even ruin lives, or the choice to destigmatize, which can damage and ruin countless lives as well. It's a hard enough call that I can safely say I would have sided with the social liberals in a different time and place. But we've come a long way down their road, and I think we know enough about the consequences to say that there would be real gains to human welfare available - for downscale Americans, especially, but not only for them - if we were to go some distance in a more conservative direction.

But what if, in fact, there is no actual "choice" to destigmatize? What if the cruelty of some social norms - such as the way in which illegitimate children were once treated - leads to a gradual and irreversible social change? The real choice today in many areas is whether to re-stigmatize - and that is a very hard thing to do in a diverse, free and changing society. We will, I hazard to guess, never reinstate the "bastard" smear - even though it was probably effective in some respects in the past. So what now? Surely the more reasonable option is simply not to encourage socially disadvantageous behavior (as welfare once did), and to create a model of successful family structure that others might emulate. Obama's marriage and family are probably much more effective in this than a lecture about abstinence from Rick Santorum.

And, of course, much of Christianism today is sadly not about stigmatizing certain behaviors, but about stigmatizing certain groups - non-believers, libruls, gays, etc. And the moral crudeness of much fundamentalism in dealing with its sometimes desperate adherents leads not to better lives but to more conflicted and desperate ones.

I mean ask yourself: does Ted Haggard suffer from not enough shame or too much?