UNITED STATES
Longview News Journal
November 14, 2017
By Ross Douthat
Lately we have been given an extended education in the different varieties of liberal pigs. There’s the industrial-scale predator who buys indulgences from Planned Parenthood. And the male feminist who respects women so very much — especially when they’re too drunk to resist him. And the Great Man of Letters creeping on his co-workers. And the let-it-all-hang-out artist who thinks it can’t be assault if the only person you’re touching is yourself.
But this past week our era of exposure has reminded us that cultural conservatism has its own distinctive swine.
So while we wait to see what becomes of Alabama Senate candidate and professional Christian Roy Moore, who is credibly alleged to have spent his 30s pursuing high school girls with the “I get older, they stay the same age” gusto of Matthew McConaughey’s character in “Dazed and Confused,” it’s worth doing a quick typology of the predators that flourish among the godly and moralistic.
One type is what you might call the rotten patriarch. This is the man who depends on the trappings of spiritual or familial authority to exploit the young and weak, shame them into silence and preemptively discredit them.
The rotten patriarch might be anyone from a handsy pastor or a lecherous pillar of the community to the leader of a sect or religious order. And in the defenses of Moore from various Alabama Republicans you can see the way conservative impulses protect this kind of figure — both in the suggestion that a man of his religious reputation should be trusted over his accusers, and in the risible invocation of biblical examples to defend an older man’s lust for a 14-year-old girl.
But there are other styles of predation that flourish within conservative communities. For instance, there is the burrower, the networker, the institutionalist — the predator who embeds himself within a hierarchical system that protects him because it wants to protect itself.
Many Catholic priests-abusers fit this pattern. Their clerical authority didn’t always keep them from getting chased out of parishes. But they were networked with other predators who helped them skate through to the next assignment, and the larger ecclesiastical entity saw its own self-protection as more important than their punishment.
Then finally there is the serial repenter — the creep who relies on the promise of forgiveness to keep his place and his powers and his opportunities to prey again.
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