WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE RACIST LAWYER?
Baseball Crank, writing under his pen name Dan McLaughlin at National Review, wants you to know he thinks Racist Lawyer Aaron Schlossberg "deserves public moral condemnation" for "letting fly a racially incendiary tirade at Spanish-speaking workers in a crowded Madison Avenue restaurant." (Actually Schlossberg told them he was calling ICE on them, which, given the viciousness of that agency toward even citizens who merely speak Spanish, is much worse.)
This being National Review, you knew there would be a "but" -- except McLaughlin uses the more highfalutin' "although of course" instead, because he is not just talking about some racist who "had the misfortune" to get caught racisting -- he's also stickin' it to the liberals with classy literary references!
See, says McLaughlin, when modern people read The Scarlet Letter they engage in "snickers, sneering, and judgmental tut-tutting at those awful Puritan prudes who would force an adulterous woman to wear an outward sign of the shame of her sin for her entire life and endure communal shunning over her violation of a social norm that we, in our own era, would not even regard as a crime." Not sure where B-Head has observed all this sneering and snickering -- maybe in fever dreams, or at a showing of that Demi Moore movie.
Anyway, this alleged sneerfest shows what hypocrites we moderns are because Schlossberg is like Hester Prynne. No, really -- when we are moved to condemn Schlossberg,
This is very much the same impulse that motivated the Puritans... In other words, we see it in exactly the same terms that the Puritans saw adultery, which could trigger violence, blackmail, and produce illegitimate children who could face infanticide or become wards of the state... And just as today, the punishment is unequally distributed: Her lover’s identity is publicly unknown, so she wears the scarlet letter alone (just as Schlossberg is punished not just for his sin but for the happenstance of it going viral), yet it is also visited on her innocent dependent child.
You see what he's getting at: You modern sex people are the real Puritans, because just as Hawthorne's Puritans punished poor Hester for premarital sex, you want to punish poor Schlosberg for racism. And this condemnation inspires the same pity and terror, at least in the breast of B-Head. Get a load:
Morally, Schlossberg deserves public moral condemnation, although of course it’s fair to ask — just as Hawthorne implicitly asked — how far we should go, and how indelibly the stain should endure. That’s a question our criminal justice system has wrestled with for years, but in some ways it’s an even harder one to answer when there’s no point at which an offender can say he has paid his debt to society. And of course, as critics of the Puritans fairly noted, we should consider leavening moral justice with mercy and some humility about our own sins.
"How far we should go, and how indelibly the stain should endure"? Buddy, this all happened last week. There's plenty of time for Schlossberg, as a connected white guy, to move on from his noncriminal immorality. If Ben Domenesch can do it so can he!
But what is striking is the fact that the sorts of people most eager to exact punishment on Schlossberg are precisely the same folks who would lecture us no end about how terrible it is to be morally judgmental and how backward the world of the Puritans was... People who say they don’t want to judge sin invariably just want to judge different sins.
Yeah -- the Puritans wanted to punish women for premarital sex, but you libtards are mean to a guy who yells racist abuse at people -- same diff!
I'm all for showing forgiveness, but as with Rod Dreher and the Barbecue Complaint Lady, I notice 1.) guys like this only ever plead forgiveness for bigots, and 2.) they only use forgiveness as a pretense to attack someone who isn't racist.