Conversation 9 comments by 5 users
  • idlethreat
    +3

    I feel kinda bad for the dude, to be honest. He's been shit all over since the molestation thing came out. Aaaand now he's been found to be involved with the Ashley Madison thing. Basically, every bad thing over the next 6 months news places will be trying to tie him in with it.

    He was raised in a sexually repressed household, did some shitty stuff when he was a kid (14 is a kid, imo) that got out and made him look like a monster. Now he looks even worse for being involved in this. Made some dumb decisions and now his entire life is open to the ridicule of everyone who can pick up a remote or open a web browser.

    • spaceghoti
      +11

      A lot of it is his upbringing; the repressive household plus the idea that as a man and head of household he can do no wrong. He might make mistakes, but it's always someone else's fault. One of the reasons I don't have much sympathy for him is the last part; I think it's important to hold him and his family accountable for the problems they've created here and the impression that they can issue a non-apology and whitewash the whole thing.

      • FivesandSevens (edited 8 years ago)
        +5

        I think it's important to hold him and his family accountable for the problems they've created here

        Yes. This is not just a guy with problems, it's a repressive ideology that produces problems like his. It will continue to do so as long as it can hide behind divine forgiveness and avoid a reckoning for the effects it has on society and its members' psychologies.

      • idlethreat
        +5

        I agree with you. However, if the whole list of my mess-ups were suddenly on the cover of People magazine, i'd be doing everything I could do to exit stage left and get the fuck out of the limelight before it ended my marriage and destroyed everything I'd built up until that point.

        But, he gets dragged back onto the world stage once again and ridiculed. Until the next whipping boy shows up.

        • spaceghoti
          +8

          Part of the problem is that he keeps bringing it on himself. He doesn't just say "yes, I was wrong. I'll stop preaching to other people about how they're being immoral." He uses each of his own fuckups as a platform to tell other people how they're sinners. So I still have no sympathy for him; when he stops being a hypocrite I'll agree it's time to leave him alone.

          • idlethreat
            +4

            I'll have to defer to your knowledge over my own. I haven't followed anything about the guy, other than the molestation thing and now this. I wouldn't be able to pick him out of a line up if my life depended on it.

    • Kalysta
      +5

      I can't feel bad for him. When his teenage hormones were raging, instead of hooking up with peers from his school or church, like normal teenagers, he molested his younger sisters. One was 5 years old at the time. Anyone who looks at a 5 year old and thinks "sex toy" before anything else has something seriously wrong with their heads. No matter what people say about post-pubescent 14 year olds looking older than their age, no one can look at a 5 year old and think that the child is mentally and physically ready for sexual activities. Hell, most 5 year olds have just decided that the opposite sex has cooties. And instead of getting him actual help, his parents sent him to carpenter boot camp. Both he and his parents should be sent to jail for this occurring. He was old enough at the time to know that diddling kids is wrong. I don't care how sexually repressed he is. At least with the Ashley Madison thing, one can assume the girls he was after were of age. Meanwhile, I fear for the safety of his current children.