Let ‘he that is without sin...’ Let’s take a hard look at political stone throwers
A Kansas City vice squad officer testified in municipal court that a woman had offered him $20 to perform a particular sex act. By fixing the price, she triggered her arrest. Now, never having collected the money or supplied the service, she was up for judgment before a crowd of other arrestees and lawyers.
This trial just happened to play out as I waited to cover a different case my editor had assigned 62 years ago when I was a young Kansas City Star reporter. Only by coincidence was I there to witness that industrious cop and the shabbily dressed woman play their parts. She had pleaded innocent. The judge found her guilty and assessed the penalty.
“I fine you $5,” he said. “Pay the clerk.”
The lady smiled and began rummaging through her purse. The officer scowled: All his clever scheming and expertise was wasted for a $5 penalty. I knew the judge himself as an affiliate of an old Pendergast political faction. The judge knew me as a Star reporter. He smiled and winked.
“It’s a 10,000-year-old profession,” he said, as if the antiquity of the offense justified his teensy verdict. Like the cop, I felt indignant. I grew up in a dear little Southern Baptist church. Sinning is sinning, after all, though rarely does it cost us even $5.
Today, as an 89-year-old graybeard, I look back and marvel at that righteous young reporter who, had he been the judge, might have bounced that lady into jail. I was nowhere near decent enough then to follow Jesus’ example in John 8:3-11 as he dealt with Pharisees eager to stone a woman taken in adultery (but not the man).
“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” Jesus said. Timidly, the Pharisees retreated as Jesus told the woman, “Go, and sin no more.” Though I was not decent enough then, not merciful enough, I am better now — as are the vast majority of Americans.
When I was young, Black children were shut out of the good Tulsa schools I attended, their parents deprived of decent housing, jobs, medical care and friendships with white people they might have enjoyed — also depriving whites of that joy. I was 30 years old when Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, infuriating whites of the former Democratic solid South, who flocked to the Republican party.
During the 1960s Kansas City police scoured the nighttime shrubbery around Liberty Memorial arresting gay people. My gay reporter friends at The Star (whom I didn’t know were gay) dared not reveal themselves.
But we treat Black people better now, gay people as well. The Gallup poll reveals that between 1996 and 2022, the percent of Americans who accept gay marriage rose from 28% to 71%. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled gay marriage legal in 2015.
Deprived of hating the gay community as an election-winning issue, this greater compassion created problems for the Republican Party. So they quickly unearthed and broadcast new “sins” — just one being their horror that a trans woman might dare occupy a bathroom booth next to a person assigned female at birth. (As a heterosexual male of advanced age, I do not fear all-gender restrooms.)
Republicans decry the possibility that trans female athletes might play on a team against “frail” girls, though it’s nearly always politicians — not the athletes themselves — who voice this fear. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas in a recent Supreme Court opinion even raised doubts about the future of contraception, foretelling a ban on sex without the risk of birthing babies.
Some Republicans now even call for revival of the Comstock Act of 1873, never repealed, which bans the mailing of “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” material, including devices used “for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose.”
As for political presidential nominees, it’s much too late now, of course, but given the choice, I would pick someone like that decent, even Christian, court judge who so long ago let the weary woman off with a $5 fine.
Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.
