Why These Sex Scandals Matter

I'm old enough to remember when you could have a reasonably civilized conversation with Corey DeAngelis on social media, and everyone is old enough to remember when his main social media function was to lead a small army of trolls against anyone who dared to oppose the right wing school privatizing culture panic crowd (we can all remember that because it was as recent as about a week ago).

Those days are gone, of course, now that DeAngelis has become the sixty-gazzilionth person to discover that the internet is not a private place, as he's been outed as a featured performer in a bunch of gay porn under the name Seth Rose. Since the story was broken (in a far right website of all places), DeAngelis has been erased from several websites of the many thinky tanks and advocacy groups that employed this chief evangelist for choice. 

The pro-public school crowd has been largely quiet about the news, and big time education media hasn't picked it up yet. Andy Rotherham has a piece about it, which is appropriate-- Rotherham and Bellwether have been unique in the right-tilted reformster edusphere in not jumping on the culture panic bandwagon. 

There is no reason for any of us to care what an adult human person does. Lord knows we could have some more useful conversations right now if folks weren't wasting so much time panicking over other peoples' business. 

And yet this parade of personal scandal-- the Zieglers, Mark Robinson, Seth Rose--matters for several reasons. 

For one thing, whenever someone puts on a public display of super-strong beliefs, the question always hangs in the air-- is this person a true believer, or is this all just a performance. As Rotherham writes, "it's not the heat, it's the hypocrisy." At a minimum, the hypocrisy shows us that there are extra qualifiers in their belief system ("Gay stuff is evil and bad-- except when it involves people I know personally"). At most, it shows us that they didn't believe a word of what they were saying and were just launching opportunistic attacks. And if even they don't believe in it, why should anyone else?

But that in turn reveals another problematic layer, which Rotherham touches on here:

As is often the case with this sort of thing it seems like this is probably a deeply troubled person in one way or another. Corey may have been lacking a fully functional empathy or compassion gene, that doesn’t mean you should.

It is one thing not to feel empathy or compassion for people who are different. But what sort of empathy deficiency does it take to avoid empathy for people who are, in fact, like you? What does it say about you as a human being when your private personal life does not inform your public life in some positive way?

There are layers to consider here. How can we live in an era in which it is so easy to dig into someone's background, and yet vetting seems to be failing so often--particularly when this same culture war story is repeated over and over and over again? What's the bench strength like in the privatizer world-- will a new chief choice evangelist step up soon? 

I don't wish DeAngelis ill, even though he so often wished people ill straight to their faces. At the same time, I don't wish him to be spared the karma that he has so richly and ambitiously earned; he used cultural panic over LGBTQ persons to help him sell vouchers and troll armies to try to silence anyone who dared to disagree with him. He had a choice to pursue his ambitions without being awful to other human beings, and he chose being awful. And you can't spread toxins all around you without getting soaked in it yourself. 

All of these folks are young enough to have a second act ahead of them. Maybe time will pass and their patrons will declare them born anew, and they'll be back at the same old grift. Maybe they will take a moment to look inside and come to some sort of peace with themselves; living a lie is really exhausting. Maybe it's just a chance for the rest of us to practice grace, a quality far too rare in our culture today, thanks in part to folks like DeAngelis.

In the meantime, voucher debates and culture panic will rage on and we will all have to continue sorting out people who want to have serious conversations from those who just want to play games for personal ambition.