“Utah judge at rape sentencing: Ex-Mormon bishop a ‘good man'”

This story generated a bit of national controversy, and understandably so:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/utah-judge-rape-sentencing-mormon-bishop-good-man-46804715

See also:

“Judge Who Called Convicted Rapist a ‘Good Man’ Likely Won’t Face Punishment”

The judge’s comment is the sort of remark that, viewed from one angle — and especially when viewed by people seeking a cause for indignation or looking for a weapon to use in a larger war — was sure to stir up trouble:

Rape is obviously not the act of a good man.

But can good men do bad things?  Can a good person act terribly?  Yes.  Sadly, it happens all the time.  And, despite the photograph accompanying the article to which I link above, which makes him look supremely smug and self-satisfied, there is apparently considerable strong evidence for good things in and about this man.

It’s transparently clear to me what Judge Low’s point was.  Those who are going after him seem to me, in many ways, to be seeking to make him an offender for a word.  It’s almost as if they’re deliberately trying to misunderstand his comment.

To me, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is that that horror was perpetrated by ordinary, decent people who were, if anything, unusually good and well-intentioned on most occasions and under typical circumstances.  Had they simply been thugs by nature, bad and violent people, what happened there in southern Utah wouldn’t be so stunning and so baffling.

Likewise, people who aren’t very good can sometimes rise to heroic virtue.  Oskar Schindler seems to have been a spectacular example of this.  Thomas Becket may have been another, in a rather different way — more like the ex-slaver-turned-abolitionist John Newton.

We shouldn’t be surprised at this, really, as we’re all a mixture of good and bad, susceptible to inspiration and prone to temptation.

None of this is to minimize the terrible crime of rape or sexual molestation — though I write in full awareness of the fact that some of my critics will want, if they can, to portray me as doing so.  None of it is to suggest that this man shouldn’t be severely punished for the crime of which a jury convicted him.

But I’m not surprised at what this judge said, even if I recognize how naïve and unwise he may have been to say it.  What he said was absolutely true.  And it should not be forgotten that he both described Vallejo’s apparent crime as a “bad thing” and set the stage for a very tough criminal sentence.  In no way did he excuse the crime or brush the offense aside.

It would be easier for us to believe that criminals are utterly different from us, a distinct species.  But they’re not.  That was surely one of the principal points of Hannah Arendt’s classic 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

In his The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn makes my point with powerful eloquence:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
“During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.”