“Any one of us would hate to be thought of as the worst thing we ever did.” @kohenari

I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. My February column (which came in so late it actually ran in March) is a sorta interview I did with Ari Kohen (Schlesinger Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Forsythe Family Program on Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs at the University of Nebraska, author of books, human rights activist, researcher generally known for his work on heroism/moral decision making, basically solid dude, and chum of mine from auld lang syne).
Although Woody Allen’s alleged 1992 rape of his seven-year-old adopted daughter is the inciting incident for that conversation, the column itself is *not* about Woody Allen, Dylan Farrow, rape, fame, patriarchy, or the law.
It *is* about how we should think about our interactions with those who transgression, and the pitifalls of the psychological standards we use to decide when (or if) we’ll accept a transgressor back into our midsts. Quoth Kohen:

I consistently tell people, when I talk about the death penalty and people on death row, is that it’s troubling to judge someone by the worst thing he ever did, and say “This is the measure of the man.” This is a point I got long ago from Sister Helen Prejean, she says it all the time, that any one of us would hate to be thought of as the worst thing we ever did. I think there’s some merit to that. I think most people want to draw a line and say “Well, not when it comes to murder; murderers are murderers and that is the most relevant fact about them,” and they’d make the same case about child rapists, or pedophiles, whatever; that’s what you are.
But I try – and it’s stressful – but I try not to think of people that way, not to think of people as monstrous, and not to think about people as being that worst thing, but as having made terrible decisions and having made atrocious mistakes, or having acted on terrible impulses. It’s difficult, and it’s one of the hardest things to talk to people about when you talk about criminals and people in prison. [. . . ] Because, generally, free people think of themselves as being very, very different from [criminals and] incarcerated people, that there’s a fundamental break between someone who is in prison and someone who is not in prison. [. . .] The idea that they could, or that someone they love could be, in prison is a shocking idea, because they are categorically different. . . .

Much more here: The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Crimes and Misdemeanors