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I have to say too, that I might punch someone who ever called my child anything than an amazing creation of God. I'm so grateful for the Grace of God, and that when He looks at me, he doesn't see the yucky sin, or a lifestyle choice, he sees me redeemed.

As an adopted child who was born out of wedlock - I THANK YOU!! Pisses me off when people bitch about unwed mothers and call the children bastards, and then wonders why the world is so rife with abortions.

Yeah, if I may chime in, the children who are born out of wedlock are truly victims and just come to the world through no fault of their own. Many times in history, the children born out of wedlock were treated harshly and that was wrong. I think there is a time to reach out to unwed mothers and their children with help and the idea of redemption and getting them on the right path. Yes, there are times you need to send a message where that is wrong but to keep it up and demonize them will just drive them away from getting on the right path.

If you want a good but sad book about all of this, try David Graham Phillips' "Susan Lenox, Her Rise and Fall" where the central character was a "love child" where her mother died during childbirth and it was up to her aunt (she is the mother's sister) her uncle and her cousin Ruth. Well, to make a long story very short, her aunt and uncle seem to think she is "going the way of her mother" so they marry her off to some cad of a sharecropper farmer, she runs off and the adventure begins to where she has a hard life. She eventually becomes a somewhat famous actress, but it seems her life is empty and deviod of love to the point to where her gains in money and fame seem like a "pyrric victory. In the beginning of the book, a lot of young men in her school and town would have loved to get to know her but would have nothing to do with her, never take her dancing, courting her, because she was a "love child" even though she was of good character. Shame really, the book kind of hit me hard, I guess being a bit of a geek growing up and bullied because I was more into space and electronics than sports and stuff, I had a lot of empathy with the character because of my own negative experiences. If I was a young student in the scenario, I would have been happy to get to know her, take her to dances and if things clicked down the road, marry her. There was one young man who did try to court her but he was just looking for an "easy target" and the town buzzing about them and so on was one of the catalysts that kicked it off.