One of the more exquisite hypocrisies of our age — and there is no shortage from which to choose — is the peculiar, almost schizophrenic stance the modern Left has adopted on the question of forgiveness.
Consider this: a teenager, perhaps afflicted with the twin burdens of youth and the internet, makes a poorly phrased joke, or recycles an ill-considered opinion that was fashionable five minutes ago but is now deemed problematic. A decade later, this individual is unearthed, denounced, and condemned to a kind of moral Siberia. No statute of limitations applies. No redemption arc is permitted. The punishment is eternal.
Contrast this with the Left’s near-evangelical commitment to the rehabilitation of criminals. Violent felons, drug dealers, and sex offenders are to be coddled, their records sealed or expunged, their pasts scrubbed clean for the benefit of future employers, who, under certain laws, may even be prohibited from asking the criminal about their past, or discriminating against them for it. They are rebranded not as moral agents responsible for their choices, but as casualties of poverty, racism, and insufficient access to therapists. We are told, with finger-wagging conviction, that their crimes were really our fault. They are permitted—no, encouraged—to vote, to run for office, to rebuild their lives without the burden of stigma.
Consider the case of Alfred “AJ” Hodges, a convicted armed robber who, upon release, was praised as a symbol of social resilience and supported in a run for city council. Meanwhile, Jimmy Galligan—a biracial student—revived an old video of a classmate using a racial slur in jest, which cost her a college admission despite her apology and years of silence. The felon was given a second chance. The teenager was not.
Redemption, it seems, is a right for felons but a privilege denied to the politically unfashionable.
And perhaps criminals should be given second chances. Civil society must always wrestle with the balance between justice and mercy, and one need not be a reactionary to believe in rehabilitation. But the problem arises when that mercy is handed out not on principle, but according to the whims of ideological fashion.
Because when it comes to speech crimes—especially those committed in jest or ignorance—no such leniency is allowed. A tasteless joke told in a locker room or on Twitter is grounds not merely for criticism, but for annihilation. Your job, your reputation, your prospects—everything must be sacrificed to the insatiable gods of offense.
And what’s worse, cancellation rarely comes from those genuinely aggrieved. It is not the work of victims, but of opportunists. One might decline to watch a comedian who traffics in vulgarity—fair enough. But that is a private act of judgment. It is quite another thing to trawl through someone’s digital past like a vulture picking at carrion, hoping to find a misplaced syllable that can be weaponized. This isn’t morality; it’s malice with a press release.
The cancelled aren’t punished to uphold standards—they’re punished to send a message. The exercise is punitive, yes, but it is also performative. It asserts power. It says: we control the boundaries of acceptable thought, and we will enforce those boundaries retroactively and without mercy. It is not enough to confess; one must be seen confessing, groveling, and even then, the sentence may be irrevocable.
The road to forgiveness is closed to those who committed the ultimate sin: being unaligned with the mob.
And so we arrive at the contradiction. A convicted felon may be considered a product of circumstance, a victim of an unjust system, and worthy of reintegration. But a teenager who once laughed at the wrong joke, or quoted the wrong song lyric, is irredeemable. Why? Because in the first case, mercy serves the narrative of oppression and systemic guilt. In the second, outrage offers the chance to destroy a rival, punish dissent, or earn social capital through manufactured indignation.
This isn’t justice. It’s a theater of cruelty posing as moral clarity. The message is clear: some sins are never forgotten, and some crimes were never really crimes to begin with. And the arbiters of this perverse theology are not the courts, nor the voters, nor the philosophers, but the mob.
Well, I decline to participate.
As a Christian, I believe in forgiveness and redemption. I believe in second chances—not only for those who have committed crimes, but for those who’ve said something foolish, unkind, or ignorant. A person should not be defined by the worst thing they once said, especially when that one moment is stripped of time, context, and maturity. You found one bad thing—so what? How many good things could you have found, if you were actually looking?
There are times, too, when even the criminal has paid his debt and placed his past firmly behind him. In those moments, grace is not a weakness—it’s a moral imperative. To forgive is not to excuse, and to remember is not to condemn without end.
A culture that cannot grasp this, a culture that clings to old sins like relics and treats grace as a partisan indulgence, is not a culture of justice. It is a culture desperate to bury its own guilt by scapegoating others, casting blame to avoid indictment.
And in that, too, I decline to participate.
