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[quote=Anonymous]A good article that may make you think. This is just a portion.  The whole article is excellent. 
And, I am a Republican.

[quote]Perhaps just a few years ago, Northam’s apology and Saslaw’s defence would have been enough for the governor to be able to move on. We have all done things we’re not proud of in the past, and our most offensive and obnoxious moments do not encapsulate our lives. But given an American elite culture that is regressing to a secular version of old puritanical norms, whereby sinners are branded for life and there are political points to be scored for casting them into hellfire, it is not surprising that Northam was immediately deluged with calls to resign.

Presidential contenders such as Kamala Harris and Julian Castro called on Northam to step down. MoveOn.org—an organization based on the concept of forgiveness, which urges people to “move on” and not dwell on past misdemeanours —called for Northam to step down because “there are no excuses for such a racist display.” As every hour passes, more progressive activists and Democratic politicians are pushing to remove Northam from the governor’s office.

Yet there is a curious dissonance between the message activists are promoting—that an offensive gesture from 35 years ago should permanently end a man’s career in politics—and their campaign around America’s system of mass incarceration. When it comes to criminal-justice reform, progressives are preaching that the aim of the system should be rehabilitation, not punishment, and that criminal behaviour is forged by social influences, rather than the result of bad choices by flawed individuals. They preach a Christian message of hating the sin but loving the sinner.

I agree with that, and I consider myself in the same camp as Robert Sapolsky, a leading neurobiologist who has argued that our free will is limited if not nonexistent, and therefore we should not hate or loathe people who commit antisocial or immoral behaviour. Instead, we should try to understand the natural processes that lead to that behaviour.

But elite progressives apply this logic only on a selective basis. A year ago, for instance, the left-wing outlet I used to work for, The Intercept, published a lengthy sympathetic piece about a convicted murderer’s run for city council. The man in question knifed another man to death, and spent close to two decades behind bars. The author of that article wrote that “his experiences certainly make him an important candidate, able to connect with the thousands who have been isolated and defined by previous misdeeds of theirs or others—especially in the city’s minority communities, which as elsewhere are disproportionately impacted by the system.”

But when it comes to issues of racial offence, the publication’s editorial line—like that of much of the Left—holds expressions of bigotry to be a sort of permanent stain; as if those who committed them have revealed themselves to be demons in human form, incapable of reform. Northam must go.[/quote]

https://quillette.com/2019/02/02/the-ralph-northam-scandal-betrays-the-lefts-hypocrisy-on-forgiveness-and-rehabilitation/[/quote]

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