Over at Freethought Blogs (FtB), the author of Almost Diamonds is calling me out:
I chewed out Damion Reinhardt for trying to drop Ogvorbis’s first name on my blog without the courage to put it on his own and removed that information, as well as the name of someone from the pit he tried to leave at the same time, because he doesn’t get to use my blog to play his games.
I’m no longer allowed to reply over there, so I’ll reply here.
Ogvorbis hasn’t been at all shy about his first name, it’s right there in the relevant entry on the Pharyngula wiki, not to mention various comments over at FtB. I’m not about to apologize for repeating what is already widely known among the relevant commentariat, and it is plainly silly that this is considered controversial in the least.
Is it hypocritical to treat someone who admittedly raped as a 12-year-old who had been groomed to the task more compassionately than a 50-something-year-old who was credibly accused of raping while in full control of his faculties?
When it comes to grooming (or the lack thereof) it is surely cold comfort to victims of sexual abuse that the perpetrator was themselves abused. Any of the various men accused of sex crimes by the bloggers at FtB may well have been groomed or inculturated, for all we know. This changes precisely nothing in the moral calculus, harm done is no less harmful even when made less inexplicable. Indeed, the whole point of “rape culture” in feminist theory is to show how men are socially groomed to rape women.
A far better question, from the perspective of a moral consequentialist, is who presents a greater danger at this point in time. The man whose name and face have been spread all over FtB along with allegations of sexual predation (thereby putting people on notice) or the man who remains safely hidden behind a socially normalized veil of pseudonymity? The man who said “I would never have sex with a woman so intoxicated she could not consent” or the man who said, “I think I have let the monster out twice. Once in that bedroom with the three little girls. The second time, that same summer, I beat up an older and larger boy who was bullying me. . . . Is the monster still there? I think so.”
Maybe one or both of them are mistaken or lying, but I certainly don’t get the sense that the faceless and pseudonymous man with an abusive monster lurking inside is somehow less of a threat to potential victims than the well-known public figure who has been very publicly and repeatedly declared to be a threat to the skeptical community at large.
I would like to believe that both of these men are well past the point where they would harm anyone, but I don’t know either of them well enough to say that. All I can say for sure is that if you are intent on blaming or exonerating only one of them, you have slipped from critical thinking into purblind partisanship.
