Facing sin

Dealing with two crisis pregnancies a century apart | Marvin Olasky

Newsweek last month reported a lesson learned by J.C. Watts, the Republican congressman from Oklahoma who is a potential vice president in 2001. Rep. Watts was a high-school senior in Oklahoma in 1976 and "king of the campus-until he got a white girl pregnant." Rep. Watts is black.

This crisis pregnancy occurred nearly a century after another one that also became nationally significant. Grover Cleveland in 1874 impregnated Maria Malpin; he did not marry her, but he did acknowledge his fatherhood and give the child both his name and his financial support. All was quiet in western New York, where they lived, until Mr. Cleveland became the Democratic nominee for president 10 years later. Republicans at that point began arguing that voters would have to choose "between indecency and decency, between lust and law."