[Warning: This article contains some graphic and disturbing stuff.]
Somebody is going to have to help me with the rules again. Maybe I'm just slow and unable to keep up, but I find myself regularly confounded by what sure seems like a symphony of inconsistency coming from the arbiters of cultural morality these days.
If you don't remember the name Jesse Dirkhising, there's a reason. Even though he was the victim of one of the most brutal child sexual assault and murder cases in American history, his name was blacked out by mainstream media. The Washington Post defended their silence on Dirkhising's case by saying they don't cover "more routine crimes."
"Our policy is not to cover murders from out of the Washington area at all unless it's a case of mass murder or has caused a large local sensation or has raised a larger social issue," the paper wrote at the time.
The boy's mother, an LGBT ally, had allowed her son to stay out of town on the weekends with a gay friend of hers so that her son could help him at the beauty salon he owned. That friend, 38-year-old Davis Don Carpenter, and his 22-year-old gay lover Josh Brown, took advantage of those weekends to sexually abuse Dirkhising, who was just 13 and entering junior high school at the time in 1999.
When police were called to the two men's shared apartment one early morning, they found a grisly scene. Carpenter was frantic while Brown stood naked next to a nude and unresponsive Dirkhising. The boy had been bound with duct tape, feces spread across his privates and his abdomen, and a bottle of sedatives was next to him.
It was determined that the two men had repeatedly raped the boy for two days. Though he had seemingly survived the sexual trauma, he died choking on his own underwear that Brown had stuffed in his mouth to gag and silence him when he went to make himself a sandwich.
You know, just "routine crime."
Coming on the heels of the highly publicized Matthew Shepherd murder, the news blackout on Dirkhising's death left many crying foul about the unwillingness of national media to run any story that depicted LGBT individuals as predators rather than victims.
The fear, it seemed, was that the horrific conduct of these two gay sadists might be used to discredit or unfairly smear an entire community of people who had every right to love who they wanted to love and live how they wanted to live. Carpenter and Brown should be held accountable for their own actions, but using their conduct as a pretense to cast reproach upon all people who practice unconventional sexual behavior was called immoral and unjust.
That was then.
If you haven't heard, former 19 Kids and Counting star Josh Duggar was recently arrested for possession of child pornography. This is the same Josh Duggar who sexually abused minors as a teenager, including his own sisters. Reading the details of his pattern of depraved conduct over the years, it seems impossible to think that at one point this sex offender was employed by the Family Research Council as a charismatic voice for Christian family values.
Author and attorney Racheal Denhollander chronicled just some of the revolting tale:
Calling it gross would be an understatement. Calling it wicked and degenerate only scratches the surface. But is it wise or prudent of us to consider Duggar an anomaly? Just a random sicko who gave Satan access to the recesses of his mind and secret places of his heart? Interestingly, it seems like our culture doesn't think so.
Denhollander points out how deep the roots to this kind of debauchery actually run. Sensible people will pay attention.
Denhollander explains that the woman objected to having Josh in her house all day, around children, with her husband off at work. The FBI agent working the case similarly thought that was a bad idea. But the woman's husband disagreed, as did the judge, and she was forced to find another place to teach her lessons so that Josh could come stay at her house by order of the court.
To be explicitly clear, I agree with the questions Denhollander is raising. Culturally, and certainly within Christendom, the ideas we teach about sex and individual dignity are of utmost importance. When they are skewed from God's intent, human beings suffer.
But if we agree that it is not enough to say, "Duggar should be held accountable for his own actions, but using his conduct as a pretense to cast reproach upon all people who hold to similar views on sexuality and submission is immoral and unjust," shouldn't we apply that consistently?
Shouldn't the same be said for, say, Carpenter and Brown?
Ideas matter and they have consequences. Not every idea about sex and sexuality is as good as the next. It's a very tiny sliver of humanity that would disagree on that point; it's determining who is right and wrong about where to draw the line that becomes contentious.
To that end, wouldn't we be better off if there was a moral authority, perhaps one that came from the very mind of our Creator and Designer, that we fallible humans promoted and embraced as best?
I understand human nature suggests doing it our own way is more fun. But there's an ever-growing list of victims who would likely disagree.
