Ken says:

Are we therefor to judge a person, Josh, unfit to serve a position of high moral responsibility for the kind of offenses he committed at the age he did them, especially in light of how he dealt with them and how his parents did at that time? Are all of them to be coward from expressing positions of public morality despite their essential consistencies in God knows how many ways and times in practicing their faith; in the balance of what we know are these in comparison to be considered of no weight and importance?

And as far as their faith goes I think they handled it as their faith dictates, according to the informed conscious they had of their faith. Now as a Christian of a certain kind of the thousands, excuse ten’s of thousands of christian beliefs out there, a person may not like television Evangelist’s and thus consider all TV fame built on moralizing distasteful and repugnant, and even consider it inherently evil, but that is a personal choice and not one that can be arbitrated on individuals or should be–it is too personal; I would say this is not a terribly healthy standard for deciding someone is unfit for engaging in the important public discussion of the important moral issues of the day nor an inherent reason to give their position in their advocacy little or no weight.

The question really is do they deserve the calumny they have incurred for living the lives they have led; there is too great a hint of it being acceptable to view them as moral monsters, a position which is a moral monstrosity in itself ; from what we know so far this position is unconscionable as well as unjustified.

I can sense the blood hounds on the hunt again. Should we go on digging to hunt down every possible corner of their lives for a trail of any kind of moral deviancy under any set of conditions already determined to use the found dirt to damn them and their associates further as moral monsters? Have we really lost any sense of proportion about these things? Will we not then be accomplices in further tanking the standard for public moral deviancy down by what I would consider a piling on effect of the herd mentality that creates a harmful and false moral equivalency that is not Christian morality and further abets what games people are playing with morality in the public forum? should we really consider as serious not just the moral equivalency but the inverted standard now being set between an unrepentant fully matured homosexual and a contrite teen boy for an act he may have not had a developed and matured conscious to control such a new and powerful feature of his humanity, his maturing sexual drive that blooms so powerfully at such a time as it does unconsciously, that has always been considered the most terrible and difficult for anyone to know always when it may lead to and cause any kind of offense; and whose standards vary from culture to culture and through time and even between individuals, so personal it can be? Are we serious?

Historically, the oldest practices of Christianity play here in the Duggars life in a three fold sense. One is the duty to inform the state. Done. The second is to represent it to the church. Done. The third is to amend. Done. If this is the pattern their lives trace, this is exemplary Christian conduct and we should laud it.

Another aspect of historical Christianity involved here is that traditionally these confessions within the Church were kept private when confessed to a religious like a priest because they are between the conscious of the believer and their God. The confessor could make the act of reparation going to the state, but say if the state would kill the person or so assault them in a heinous fashion, like for committing adultery or a homosexual act, for what is a grave sin against religion and God but not so much against the public good as the public deems to be proportionate to the conduct what is the confessor to do for this sincerely contrite and humbled human embodied soul?

In short the great moral civil question we should be concerned is elsewhere. This case demonstrates how dangerously politicized the arms of justice and police power have become. When lawlessness by officials who have sworn to uphold the law is no longer understood and treated for the heinous crime it is to the rule of law and of social moral conscious it has been in the tradition of liberal western culture the premises on which our whole societies future advances and as well as its continuance will be forfeited. This blatant and in public view lawlessness in using their office to fulfill arbitrarly their personal vendetta’s is offensive to the extreme to the stability and survival of the rule of law itself.

Such an act as this officer conducted who was commissioned and empowered to uphold and defend the law is just about the most heinous and disgraceful of legal offenses possible for anyone to commit. The harm done to the individual and the society is grave indeed–it is among the highest of crimes. The official’s lives ought to suffer terribly for having committed what is among the very the worst crime against the public trust. To those given greater power over the life of citizens a greater code of conduct is required; the plainest of these have been violated without any qualm and blatantly done as it has been in public view; to have done it is a black and white legal and moral outrage. Hard as it may be to believe they must have expected to be provided cover and lionized for this. The demoralizing effect on the rule of law is extremely detestable.

The Duggars have done nothing to consciously harm the public good and whatever measure it can be argued to have been done by them can only be based on a difference in philosophies, political, morally, and social differences in thought and attitude, and not legal differences or differences that an enlightened conscious fully aware of the essentials of the Christian ethos and the difficulties of human frailty and comparative and objective ethical judgement can call a case of reprehensible hypocrisy–the Christian ethos is so difficult in its unearthliness but it is also so worthy of the fidelity of stumbling at it, getting up, and having a go at it again because it alone humbles us according to how we should be by our nature. A public morality could never hope to climb so high, so it shouldn’t pretend that it does.

As for Christians who in their hearts would join the pile up they must remember that never must a repentant Christian sinner forgo the power of grace to make them a new person and a true witness to Christian faith and morality. It is shameful and scandalous for a Christian to believe otherwise. That would be damning St. Paul and St. Peter to save Jesus Christ. It is to have gotten the whole understanding backwards.

However this brazen, lawless, unprincipled, and I would say pure evil public act of a police chief deserves the strongest penalty afforded by the law and the culture. The official has personalized their office in a way that is tyrannical in its reach and power without any sense of how heinous their act is–this is greatly horrifying. How did she get so far in the ranks of law enforcement? That is a much more serious question that ought to be examined in order to examine how such a mistake can be kept from happening again. We must try to keep such monsters from being able to so personalize the rule of law as to rip it out at its root.

I would further add no law can make it impossible for such monsters to gain such powers and abuse it. Only a culture that is so appalled at the very sense of it–and has the sense of it– can build an adequate deterrent from it happening again. We better start at that right now. All americans should be able to see this far into this situation as it stands today and agree with this sentiment and belief or we are in deep, deep trouble.

The rule of law established by our founders alone protects us from the worst of all social and moral evils which is the public practice of an arbitrary rule of justice rather than an enlightened and principled system of justice. We must uphold the foundations of our rule of law which in its intent is to be consistently and equally applied to all lawful citizens and which truly and accurately observes what the natural law consists. Only in this can people live out the best that a society may offer in its ability to advance human reason and natural morality; it alone can best foster the good, right, and just toward the greatest potential for human fulfillment and happiness for each individual and the society as a whole–and this order is not top down Darwinism from the likes of a local police chief who is oblivious to the heart of the laws which they swore a sacred oath to uphold and defend.