Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Most moralists would have no difficulty with the notion that good people have a flip side; they are sometimes bad. The trick in judging them morally, which ought to be done rarely and with great circumspection, is not to slide into a kind of moral Manichaeism in which you end up saying that the good side of a man redeems the bad side. It does not . St. Augustine, who was very bad before his mother drew him into Christianity, may serve as a model. He flew from his sins without having make the mistake of believing that his meritorious works in some sense cancelled the sins. It took sometime after the late former Sen. Edward Kennedy died for people to get around to noticing that he was, in fashionable parlance, “complex,” which is to say he was riven, as most men are, by sin. Or, if agnostic and atheistic readers prefer a less religiously freighted expression, we might say Kennedy was the victim of “human failings.” Some of Kennedy’s human failings were monstrous. Kevin Rennie , a...