I drew chuckles on Tuesday when I told a crowd of journalists about my schooling: I attended a Jewish middle school and a Catholic high school, sent to those instutions by my mother, an English teacher who just wanted me to get a good education.

One of the best things about that experience was the education I got on how different religions view life. At my Jewish middle school, we had sessions with the Temple's rabbi to talk about life and Jewish law. At my Catholic high school, we had a class every semester focused on the faith and its tenets (one class was actually called, simply, "faith.")

Those lessons rose in my mind again as I thought about the awkward comments and positions so many conservative candidates seem to have on the issue of rape, conception and abortion.

Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates summed up the thinking this morning in a blog post called Mourdock, Conception and Theodicy, in which he took apart Indiana senate candidate Richard Mourdock's recent statement in a speech: "I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen."

Stay with me here. Without the ability to freely choose any action, faith is meaningless. Man must be free to choose sin for a choice to follow God to have weight.