A topic best depicted in the abstract.

If you truly want to be challenged emotionally and ethically, I suggest — though with the requisite warnings about content that’s troubling, difficult, and may put you in a head space you do not want to be in — listening to the Love + Radio episode, “A Red Dot”, an extended interview with a man describing what it’s like to live life on the sex offender registry.

This isn’t a gawking look at how awful people live. It’s an attempt to empathize with a person who for many will be the least empathetic person you can think of. And it’s successful in that it doesn’t let him off the hook for making some very bad decisions, or having moments that suggest there’s a lingering disturbance within this person. But it also confronts us with the fact that a man can make a bad decision and continue paying the price for the rest of his life, no matter how he may learn, or grow, or change. It’s heavy stuff. I dare you to listen and not find yourself, at least at moments, feeling that empathy.

The tough question is, what can or should be done in this trickiest of situations?

If it’s acceptable to keep persecuting people after they’ve paid their debt, what are the limits to punishment?

Do we believe people can change enough to be forgiven, or at the very least left to live their life?

If we do, why is it ok to keep vilifying them? If we don’t, do they deserve what we put them through, or is there a better way to handle those we want to permanently ostracize?