re: #93 freetoken

First reasonable thing Dreher has written in a while, though he’s mostly quoting another person:

[…] if we want to kick somebody, lets kick those who profited out of making this kid and his siblings into celebrities — starting with the Duggar parents.

The last quoted paragraph in the article troubles me.

This sin is disgusting. All sin is disgusting. Josh Duggar isn’t any more disgusting than you or me. He’s no different than the kids I eat my meals with at work, who also come from very messed up families. I would hate to see any of them become the laughingstock of the world, and a “proof” of everything we hate about their kind of people. I think we might do well to offer kind words to and about Josh Duggar. This world is dirty, messy, hateful, unfair, and brutal. What the boy did was in keeping with the world around him, as he had experienced it. Let’s not kick a person who is down.

I quoted it in its entirety because both the beginning and end are problematic for me. First, I don’t like the “all sins are equal” concept. I really don’t know about relative sinfullness, but practically speaking, lusting in one’s heart, stealing a bicycle, and murder really aren’t anything equivalent in the real world.

Ending with not kicking a person who is down smacks of privilege to me-send that guy selling weed on the corner to jail forever, but gosh, this guy has been publicly shamed and lost his job-surely that is punishment enough? Umm, no.

I do agree that a lot of blame goes to the parents who enabled him.