No, your moderate amount of evil is not okay

Michie · Oct 4, 2024

Corey DeAngelis and the problem of a scandalous past

Corey DeAngelis, the man with the most effective voice for school choice and parental control of education, turns out to have been a gay porn actor. (You probably don’t want to know.)

What interests me about this story is not whether a cause, in this case, school choice and funding policies, can be right even if its proponents are hypocrites or have a terrible past, and it’s not about whether someone with a sketchy past can repent and work on the side of right (of course they can and should).

It’s about whether depraved acts can be okay for adults and not okay for kids. We need to figure this out, because our moral confusion is harming our children, even as we claim to be rescuing them.

Some things are good for adults, but not for children. Some book or movie themes are dark and children should be shielded from them; but they are not bad in themselves. We can follow Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina along her path to destruction through sin, but it’s not a story we want to tell children; it would deprive them of their peace, so important to their development. Some stories are dark through and through. Everyone should avoid them and their authors should be shunned until they change their ways.

Alcohol is acceptable for adults and not for children. A 200 lb. man can drink a few glasses of wine, but children shouldn’t be imbibing. And we ought to agree that drunkenness is not acceptable at any age.

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