No, your moderate amount of evil is not okay

Corey DeAngelis and the problem of a scandalous past

Corey DeAngelis, the man with the most effective voice for school choice and parental control of education, turns out to have been a gay porn actor. (You probably don’t want to know.)

What interests me about this story is not whether a cause, in this case, school choice and funding policies, can be right even if its proponents are hypocrites or have a terrible past, and it’s not about whether someone with a sketchy past can repent and work on the side of right (of course they can and should).

It’s about whether depraved acts can be okay for adults and not okay for kids. We need to figure this out, because our moral confusion is harming our children, even as we claim to be rescuing them.

Some things are good for adults, but not for children. Some book or movie themes are dark and children should be shielded from them; but they are not bad in themselves. We can follow Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina along her path to destruction through sin, but it’s not a story we want to tell children; it would deprive them of their peace, so important to their development. Some stories are dark through and through. Everyone should avoid them and their authors should be shunned until they change their ways.

Alcohol is acceptable for adults and not for children. A 200 lb. man can drink a few glasses of wine, but children shouldn’t be imbibing. And we ought to agree that drunkenness is not acceptable at any age.

Sex is good in marriage and not good outside of it; young children ought to be protected from knowledge about it and even when they are old enough to learn some facts about it, still need to be protected from exposure, so powerful is the appetite for it (which makes sense, because along with taking nourishment, reproduction is a primal force in any living thing). Some forms of sex are wrong and harm everyone, even if they are done in secret, because secretive things have a way of making themselves known; they never remain secret, nor kept in control.

Some things are just evil. There’s not a good side to them. Evil things, sinful things, bad things, don’t become acceptable once one is an adult.

Porn is completely and absolutely wrong for everyone. It’s always wrong. It’s not just wrong to have it in schools where young people can’t avoid it. It’s wrong for adults to justify taking part in it or even look at it, and it’s done incalculable harm to our society.

The problem right now with DeAngelis is that he seems to be drawing a line just there, between gay porn being bad for children and okay for adults.

It’s hard to say. This tweet is his statement about the revelations, after a period of silence:

As an activist for parental rights and school choice, my passion is personal. Just like everyone else, I have made mistakes throughout my life, learned from those mistakes, used that as an opportunity to grow and tried to channel that experience into something positive. I was a victim of poor decisions and poor influences. I have turned that experience into the fuel that fires me to save young people from being put in the same position I was put in and to help parents protect their children. I will never stop fighting for what is right.

Opponents of the degradation of public schools are reluctant to inquire too deeply into the mind of their most effective champion; most are giving him a pass.

Well, Keri Smith, a writer on the lies of the Left, did challenge him:

None of us are a “victim” of our own poor choices, including me and including you. You are not a victim here. You chose to keep your gay porn past in the closet while you became the face of a movement working to end the sexualization of children and the exposure of children to sexually inappropriate indoctrination. You did so knowing that if this came out you could and would damage the credibility of that movement. You could have been honest up front about the mistakes of your old life, even without sharing specifics, and shown that you had a repentance and redemption experience, but you didn’t. I didn’t notice an apology in here to the parents or the anti-woke movement who aligned with you, unwittingly. Just an effort to claim victimhood. Redemption only ever follows repentance.

Smith implies in her last sentence her concern that DeAngelis has not actually repented of being involved in gay porn.

And I don’t see it in his tweet either. On the contrary.

Immediately following his tweet, the responses came pouring in. The ones from his allies affirmed him for his good work and attributed the revelations to the chaotic opposition he faces. Some opponents mock him for being a hypocrite and somehow use the revelation of his transgressions to assert their support for gay porn in schools.

In this midst of the uproar, DeAngelis retweeted a lot of the supportive messages, including this one:

Plenty of things are perfectly fine for consenting adults to enjoy but completely inappropriate for kids.

Plenty of things are perfectly fine for consenting adults, but gay porn is not one of them.

DeAngelis retweeting this opinion is why I question whether he repents of what he did before (and has amended his ways), or whether it’s just that he regrets being caught.

As Smith says, he must have known his past would come up, so why didn’t he meet it head on? Is it because he doesn’t repudiate his actions, as the retweet implies? (And spare me the “retweets don’t mean agreement — his retweets in that time frame were all from those who support him and his work.)

Or is he just confused, as so many are, about how to go about making things good? Does he just hope everyone will forget? Is he paralyzed by shame? In that case, we should help him by being very truthful.

Notice his explanation tweet doesn’t say forthrightly that gay porn is reprehensible and depraved. Is that because he’s still involved, whether in real life or in his mind and soul — still attached to his past? I say soul because sin leaves a stain. We have a right to know, just as a food company would have the right to know what the attitudes of a former poisoner are. If he’s the spokesman, it would be better for the movement not to find out that he’s still using or making gay or any other sort of porn, or thinks it’s okay for adults.

Part of the problem is we’ve become inured even to extreme evil like the videos he made. We are so worn down by our pornified society that we think opposing it sounds unrealistic. But those videos were evil and what’s more, inevitably involve children (directly — his porn involved teen boys and even a glimpse of it shows his main appeal being his youthful appearance. Joseph Sciambra has written about this and bravely tells the truth about the homosexual obsession having to do, ultimately, with a fear of death, a longing for youth, and the drive to find ever younger people as an object of the fetish).

If we’re being honest, we would acknowledge that as much as the corruption in schools has to do with a political agenda, it has to do probably even more with the immersion in porn of everyone involved. After all, if 91.5% of men and 60.2% of women admit to using porn within the span of a month, it’s likely that it’s a problem in our schools’ adult population.

We don’t want our children to smoke, but we also don’t want them exposed to second-hand smoke. Likewise and much more pressingly, we don’t want them exposed to the corruption of porn-users.

Sometimes a person can want to be forgiven and accepted, and people of good faith must forgive. But if that person has taken on leadership in a movement, then those of good faith have a duty to protect the movement — in this case, against the Left in its pursuit of imposing its perverted mores on our children. We are justified in asking for accountability. Acceptance isn’t a given, especially where repentance is not unambiguous. Sometimes, acceptance is cynical. Is it that the person is instrumental to the success of the political project? Then how altruistic is the forgiveness?

This Reason piece on his firing by his primary employer, the American Federation for Children, begins by asserting, “[DeAngelis] is being punished for a regretted incident from his distant past that has nothing to do with his current job.” Well, the incident doesn’t have nothing to do with his current job. We may be wanting innocence for our children, but we are not innocents ourselves! Surely we can trace the line between his past and advocacy for children, especially where he himself seems not clear about how far behind it is. Let’s not check our common sense in at the door.

The article states towards the end, “There is no tension between DeAngelis's decision, a decade ago, to appear in a gay pornographic film, and his current work calling for more freedom in education.” But there is tension between his gay porn past and his currently sketchy stance on that past.

The main thing is that no, we can’t accept the notion that porn, gay or otherwise, is fine among adults but not fine with children, nor can we deny there can be a fairly broad opportunity opened up by such an assumption for undermining the cause, both by means of criticism by the opposition and by compromise in the mission.

One person’s supportive tweet said in part, “I’d trust him more with my kids than I would the School of Education faculty of my alma mater.”

Though the point about the educators is well taken, I would not trust him with my kids. I’m not even sure I want to trust him with the movement. I’m asking for better categories, better principles, in handling this revelation and assessing what our response to him or to anyone in his position ought to be.

His apparent lack of understanding, of self-reckoning, about the depravity of his actions — at least, his lack of communicating what his understanding is, amounting as it does to one tweet and some retweets — is not good for us as we fight to protect our children… and it’s not good for Corey DeAngelis.