Tell me again that she was burned alive because she didn't smile properly. Tell me again that he flung his daughter off a bridge because she was singing a song he didn't like. Tell me again that he drowned himself and his daughter because his ex-wife made him angry...
Tell me again that he's a good man, a good father, a provider, an upstanding member of the community, a god-fearing man, that it's not his fault, that nobody saw this coming...
Tell me again how it's what she did, how she didn't appease him, how she wouldn't respect him, what she was wearing, who she was smiling at, her slutty behaviour, her bad morals....
We have a song when this kind of thing happens. We sing it really well. In six billion five hundred million part harmony. It's partly self-defence. So long as we do the right things, as long as we meet the right standards, so long as we jump at the right time through the golden hoops... We'll be okay, right?
Violence and abuse happens because the perpetrator chooses to be violent and/or abusive in a situation where others choose not to be.
Nothing more.
They're not "good men". They're not "just sinners". They're not "driven to it". They choose.
Moreover they learned that they could choose this way because you and I and the papers and the authorities excuse it. Because we think "oh, he's just a little weird" and "he does so much good in the community" and "well, maybe he didn't mean it like that" and "it's just the way God made men with all that extra testosterone that's gotta go somewhere hur hur".
And after the bodies are recovered and lying in the morgue, after the mourners have screamed their throats raw in the first flush of agony and finally fallen asleep in a funk of exhausted grief, we whisper gently, "he's a good man, even though he burned his wife to death, shot his son at a cricket match, abused multiple women, threw his partner out of the moving car..."
Do you think the God that wipes every tear from the eye of the broken doesn't see the way you slide respectability over brutality?
