printFor once and for all, conservatives will have to reject outright the illness model of misbehavior if they want to hold on to their delicious outrage over Harvey Weinstein’s exploits.
If you’ve sexually assaulted individuals, you’ve committed a crime. You’re not sick; you’re just a SOB.
Sexual compulsion, like drug addiction, is a misbehavior, not a disease. It certainly does not compel crime. Human beings as moral agents are expected to control their impulses. If they don’t, you punish them. If they can’t; you have them locked up (after due process) for the protection of others .
There is a price for using the therapeutic idiom for crimes or misdemeanors. The price is the medicalization of misconduct. Punishment, then, becomes problematic. For if the offender is seen as without an ability to form the intent to harm—how do you justify punishing him?
Punish evil, don’t exculpate it. The idea of rehab for Harvey is as laughable as the notion that Harvey Sweinstein is deprived, rather than depraved.
Practice: Is this red-carpet celebrity “sick,” in need of a group hug, or just an exhibitionist and a slut? (Feminists will tell you she has the right to walk around like this and expect the Harveys of the world to behave around her. But that’s for another day.) Ol’ Harvey’s was not exactly surrounded by upstanding women. Hollywood hos are not as the sanctimonious Sean Hannity portrays them (“naive, innocent young things”).
