I’m old enough to remember in 1988 when Lee Atwater, political strategist to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, ran the infamous Willie Horton ad, a devastating anchor hung around the neck of Michael Dukakis. Dukakis supported a furlough program in the Bay State for lifers, and suffered mightily when one of the beneficiaries of the furlough, Mr. Horton, took his unguarded 48-hour hall pass from prison to leave the state and go rape and torture a couple in Maryland. Back then, the idea of letting murderers out of jail was something the vast majority of Americans didn’t really like an awful lot. This year in Pennsylvania, a Democratic candidate who sat on a parole board and moved to grant early release to at least 10 lifers, easily won his Senate race because apparently not being a carpetbagger was more important to Keystone State voters than releasing murderers wholesale.

Inside prisons, there is a hierarchy, and murderers are a rung up the ladder from child molesters. So sure, Fetterman can advocate on behalf of killers, but at least he’s not in favor of releasing pedophiles, because in the joint, these lowlifes are the worst of the worst. If that’s the case in a place where morality and judgment seems in short supply, surely society at large can agree that normalizing pedophilia isn’t a good idea, right?

I know the political left in this country, along with their accomplices in legacy media, are going full tilt on the trans movement. My home state of California just adopted a new law making the Golden State a sanctuary for bringing children here so they can have gender reassignment surgery, even without parental consent. Democrats by and large are perfectly fine preventing minors from smoking, drinking alcohol, owning guns, and driving cars, but they can certainly decide their own sexuality and life-changing surgeries and hormone blockers. But at least even the Democrats and the media can agree that there’s a line out there that shouldn’t be crossed, and that line is accepting and normalizing pedophilia, right?

Director Roman Polanski remains in exile mostly in France, but also partly in Switzerland and Poland after the 1977 rape of a 13-year-old girl at a Beverly Hills Hotel. Over the years, sentiment for Polanski has gradually grown more sympathetic, but still is the minority view even in Hollywood. Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein are rightly viewed as monsters for the sexual crimes they’ve committed. Prince Andrew has been stripped of his royal title and all but been disappeared from public life because of his Epstein connections and alleged statutory rape of Virginia Guiffre. Again, at least we have a firewall against normalizing pedophilia, even as societal norms continue to decay all around us, right?

Enter the Washington Post’s theater critic, Peter Marks. A new off-Broadway play has opened up called Downstate, which delves into the issue of how harsh society is to pedophiles, and how they’re often victims of over-punishment from the legal system. Mel Brooks wrote a movie called The Producers about a couple of theater con men who hatched a scheme to make money by producing a play so abhorrent to the public that it would be a guaranteed flop. The film was comic genius because as Rush Limbaugh used to say, it demonstrated absurdity by being absurd. Absurdity has become a precursor to reality in that today, in 2022, there is now a play that is sympathetic to pedophilia, paints the now-adult victim of child rape as the antagonist, and the theater critic for the Post calls it “brilliant.”

There’s no sweeping under the threadbare rug in “Downstate” of the heinous offenses for which the men have been severely punished. We learn about what each of them has done, and we are in effect asked to judge for ourselves what magnitude of ongoing torment each deserves. It develops here as an agonizing moral question, one that our retributive correctional culture would rather not have to debate. And it is made even thornier by the drama’s most disagreeable character, a victim of Fred’s, now grown up and portrayed all too irritatingly well by Tim Hopper.

Hopper’s Andy arrives at the home with his misguidedly encouraging wife Em (Sally Murphy) to confront Fred. The playwright cannot hide his scorn for Andy, who has made a successful life for himself as a Chicago finance guy and now seems intent on some kind of purging reunion with the man who molested him as a child on a piano bench. The meeting seems to be part of Andy’s therapy, which “Downstate” implies may be advisable but at this point also suggests that it is an indulgent marinating in self-pity.

I’m sorry, but no. Just no. How this piece got written, let alone how it made it past the Post’s editors, is beyond explanation. The question is why? Why does a play like this get green lighted? Why does it get favorable coverage in the Post? Why is it that a subject that previously has been met almost universally and rightly with revulsion slowly but gradually becoming normalized by the progressive left?

On a macro level, this is just another front in the progressive left’s war on God. In an unending desire for a secular America, progressivism, born out of the Age of Enlightenment, wants to replace God with government. On a micro level, if God is no longer God, then it’s up to each individual to decide what’s right or wrong, meaning they are now their own god. Who are we, then, to judge what others do?

The left already has a nebulous and worsening view of life. We saw a slate of candidates from coast to coast that supported abortion on demand up to the point of delivery. Montana had an initiative on the ballot last month that would have simply required doctors to provide medical care to a baby born that survived an abortion procedure. Seems the decent thing to do. Montanans rejected that initiative, in essence refusing to grant personhood and the legal trappings contained therein to human beings who find themselves completely outside the womb but were never meant to make it that far. Why should we not expect that the same political ideology that holds that position, embraces gender transition surgeries for minors, would be the ones to begin to normalize sexual relations between minors and adults?

We as Christians, as conservatives, as decent people, have to pray first and foremost, and continue to call out evil things when we see it. We wouldn’t call a play portraying Mao as a sympathetic character ‘brilliant’, no matter how well acted or directed. We shouldn’t entertain or support a play that softens the edges of pedophilia, either.