Brock Turner and the permanence of sin

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

Social media blew up this week over the comparatively light sentence a California judge gave to a man found guilty of sexual assault.

Brock Turner, an all-American swimmer on a scholarship to Stanford University, faced up to 14 years in prison but instead received a sentence of just six months’ incarceration, three years probation, and the requirement to register as a sex offender.

Turner’s father called the sentence unfair. He said his son “has never been violent to anyone, including his actions on the night of Jan. 17, 2015.”

He called the sentence “a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20-plus years of life.”

That so-called “20 minutes of action” was a drunken sexual assault of an unconscious woman behind a dumpster at a fraternity party.

“Those that are calling out the double standards in the legal system are exactly right,” John Stonestreet said. “This is something that would’ve broken Chuck Colson’s heart.” Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship, rejected the tough-on-crime/soft-on-crime dichotomy in favor of the idea of restorative justice.

“Beyond that, I think the actions of the father and the words of the father might be the most discouraging,” Stonestreet said. “That’s the thing about sin, that’s the thing about committing evil against someone else. Twenty minutes of action steals 20 years of somebody else’s life. You can’t do that and then only lose six months and three years probation of your own life. It’s just simply not justice.”

The situation points to a larger problem of morally deformed parents who espouse a culture of narcissism, Stonestreet said.

“It’s not just fatherless homes; it’s parents who don’t know how to be parents,” he added.

Listen to “Culture Friday” on the June 10, 2016, edition of The World and Everything in It.