My first instinct was to call Kathleen Parker a hypocrite.
That was what I felt reading the closing paragraphs of her recent Washington Post column about the scandal at Pawleys Island Community Church in South Carolina. It felt like another familiar moment in which the ordinary vocabulary of proportionality, rehabilitation, individual culpability and second chances suddenly disappears once the offense is sexual.
But the more closely I read what Parker actually wrote, the less hypocrisy seemed like the right charge. What Parker offers is something more troubling for someone whose profession is making arguments: a conclusion that does not survive the application of her own premises.
Her argument is not merely harsh. It is incoherent.
And we know that because Kathleen Parker herself has already made many of the arguments that dismantle it.
Parker's July 24 column concerned Warren Spence Perry, a 70-year-old man on South Carolina's sex-offender registry who had been volunteering at Pawleys Island Community Church, which also operates a school and daycare.
Perry was convicted in 2023 of third-degree sexual exploitation of a minor and received a ten-year sentence suspended to five years of probation. His supervision conditions prohibited unauthorized contact with minors and barred him from places including schools and daycares. He was also required to participate in treatment and spent the first nine months of probation on GPS monitoring. WMBF News
South Carolina's Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services says it approved Perry to volunteer at the church, based partly on his supervision record and character references supplied by the pastor. But the agency says Perry did not tell his probation officer that the church also operated a school. When a parent alerted authorities, the department investigated, arrested Perry, and later found him in violation of probation at an administrative hearing. Fox Carolina
Separate criminal charges now accuse Perry of obstruction and conspiracy. Church officials face their own charges, and civil lawsuits contain additional allegations that have not been adjudicated. Fox Carolina
If Perry violated his probation, sanction the violation. If he deceived his probation officer, hold him accountable. If church leaders broke the law, adjudicate those charges. If evidence establishes new criminal conduct against a child, prosecute that conduct.
SOLAR does not need Warren Perry to be innocent of bad judgment, deception, a supervision violation, or anything else to make the argument Parker apparently cannot.
Parker does not stop at saying Perry should have followed his probation conditions. After describing “the sexual predation of children” as especially unforgivable and invoking the lasting consequences sexual exploitation can cause, Parker closes:
“Those who would knowingly and intentionally harm a child are best forgiven behind bars.”
That is no longer an argument about enforcing Warren Perry's probation. It is an argument about who belongs in prison. Kathleen Parker's July 24 Washington Post column
Perry was convicted of third-degree sexual exploitation of a minor—the South Carolina offense used for possession of child sexual abuse material. Contemporary reporting on Perry's case specifically identifies his conviction that way. WMBF News
That is a serious crime. The images involved in CSAM can document the real sexual exploitation of real children, and possession contributes to a market in material created through abuse. But precision matters precisely when the subject is this emotionally charged.
Perry was not convicted in that case of sexually assaulting a child, producing the material, or personally committing the abuse depicted in it. Yet by the end of Parker's column, the person convicted of possessing exploitation material has simply become “the predator,” and his offense has become an example of someone who “knowingly and intentionally harm[s] a child.” Washington Post
More serious allegations have since been made in civil litigation. They should be investigated on their evidence. They are not, however, the conviction for which Perry was sentenced in 2023.
Parker is entitled to condemn Perry's crime. She is not entitled to silently replace it with a different one.
The justice system had already punished Warren Perry.
A South Carolina court imposed a ten-year sentence and suspended it to five years of probation. That was not “forgiveness” in place of punishment. Probation is a criminal sentence—one that allowed Perry to remain in the community under extensive restrictions, monitoring, searches, treatment requirements and the possibility of incarceration for violating its terms. WCJB
Parker is certainly free to believe the sentencing judge was too lenient. But then she should make that argument.
Tell us what she knows about Perry's underlying conduct, criminal history, risk, mitigation, treatment prospects and the sentencing court's reasoning. Explain why probation was inappropriate for this defendant.
Instead, Parker takes evidence that Perry may have violated probation and treats it as though it proves he should have been imprisoned all along. It does no such thing. A supervision violation tells us that this person violated supervision. It does not establish that community supervision was illegitimate as a sentence.
In fact, Perry's case shows individualized supervision operating much more clearly than Parker acknowledges. The state sentenced him in the community, imposed specific restrictions, assessed and monitored him, and approved a particular volunteer activity subject to boundaries. When authorities learned information indicating that Perry had concealed the presence of the school and violated those boundaries, they arrested him the next day. An administrative hearing subsequently found him in violation and sent the matter onward to court. Fox Carolina
Individualize. Set boundaries. Monitor. Respond to actual behavior.
That is not the absence of justice. That is what individualized justice looks like.
Parker chose an unusually sweeping formulation. People who “knowingly and intentionally harm a child,” she says, are best forgiven in prison. Washington Post
Fine. Take the principle seriously.
What about the parent who knowingly drives drunk with children in the car?
What about an adult who knowingly leaves a loaded firearm accessible to a child?
What about someone who stores fentanyl or methamphetamine in a home occupied by children?
What about a domestic abuser who repeatedly terrorizes a spouse while children watch?
What about a caregiver whose deliberate neglect exposes a child to serious injury?
These acts are not identical to sexual exploitation. They do not need to be. The question is not whether every crime is “just as bad” as every other crime. Criminal law exists precisely because conduct differs.
Why does the possibility of grave or lifelong harm to children eliminate individualized sentencing when the wrongdoing is sexual, but not when the instrument is alcohol, drugs, violence, neglect or a gun?
American criminal law routinely recognizes distinctions among people who commit extraordinarily serious crimes: negligence from intent, principals from accomplices, first offenses from repeated conduct, high risk from low risk.
We do that not because the consequences are unimportant. We do it because justice without distinctions stops being justice.
Four months before declaring that people who intentionally harm children are “best forgiven behind bars,” Parker published another Washington Post column, “The absurdity of imprisoning parents for their children's crimes.”
The subject was Colin Gray, father of the teenager who carried out the 2024 mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia. His 14-year-old son used an AR-style rifle Gray had given him to kill four people—two of them 14-year-old children—and injure nine others. A jury convicted Gray of second-degree murder in the children's deaths and involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of two teachers. Kathleen Parker's March 5 Washington Post column
Parker did not defend Gray as a good parent. She described Colin and his estranged wife as terrible parents, acknowledged drug and alcohol abuse, neglect, a deeply troubled child and extraordinary warning signs, and called Gray's decision to give his son the rifle indefensible foolishness. Washington Post
And then Kathleen Parker did something important. She made distinctions. She distinguished Gray's conduct from his son's, negligence from intentional killing, moral culpability from legal culpability, and horrific consequences from the punishment appropriate to the particular person before the court.
Although he had been convicted of murder, Parker suggested that accountability might instead mean “a misdemeanor or a much lighter penalty.” Washington Post
Two children were dead. Two teachers were dead. Nine people were injured. And still she understood that the horror of the result did not relieve us of the obligation to identify precisely what Colin Gray himself had done.
Parker herself also reached for the very comparison we might otherwise have been accused of using unfairly. She asked readers to imagine a parent giving a car to a teenager whom the parent knew drank occasionally and the teenager then killing someone while driving drunk. Would the parent be responsible for the death? Washington Post
So we need not invent the DUI analogy. Kathleen Parker already did.
When the harm involved a gun: Parker insisted on distinguishing causation, intent, individual responsibility and proportional punishment.
When the conviction was sexual: those distinctions collapsed into “the predator” and “best forgiven behind bars.”
On July 30—six days after her Pawleys Island column—Judge Nicholas Primm sentenced Gray to 15 years in prison, dramatically less than the 80 years prosecutors requested. Reuters
He acknowledged the devastation while distinguishing Gray's negligence from his son's intentional murders. The judge explained that he had to put emotion aside rather than sentence from passion. Associated Press
The magnitude of harm does not relieve a justice system of the obligation to distinguish one person's conduct, culpability and risk from another's.
Parker knew this in March. The judge demonstrated it in July. Why does Parker forget it when the crime is sexual?
In 2022, Parker visited Lee Correctional Institution, a maximum-security South Carolina prison, and wrote admiringly in The Washington Post about rehabilitation programs operating there.
Parker described men with extraordinarily serious histories learning music, conflict resolution and other skills intended to help them eventually return to society. Her conclusion was explicitly about rehabilitation serving public safety: people incarcerated for serious crimes could improve their prospects for successful reentry, and society could become safer because of it. Kathleen Parker on rehabilitation at Lee Correctional Institution
Again, Parker was right. But now the question becomes unavoidable: What happens to that theory of human beings when the conviction is sexual?
If rehabilitation can matter, then at some point Parker must accept what SOLAR argues: that people should be evaluated according to who they are and the risk they present now, not permanently reduced to the worst thing in their criminal record.
And if there is no amount of treatment, compliance, aging, demonstrated change or time without reoffending that could alter Parker's conclusion, then this is not an argument for public safety. It is an argument against the possibility of rehabilitation for one disfavored class of people.
There is an obvious rebuttal available to Parker, and it deserves the strongest version. Sexual abuse of children can cause profound trauma. Sexual exploitation is uniquely invasive. Children are vulnerable. Adults hold enormous power over them. Society has every reason to exercise extraordinary care in protecting them.
Agreed. None of those propositions supplies the missing logical step.
Exceptional seriousness can justify severe punishment. It cannot justify eliminating individualization.
Murder is exceptionally serious, yet criminal law distinguishes murder from manslaughter and among different forms of homicide. Severity is not an argument against distinctions. The more serious the stakes, the more important it becomes to get the distinctions right.
That includes distinguishing possession of CSAM from production of it, a past conviction from an allegation of new conduct, and an offense category from an individual's current risk.
And it includes distinguishing the proposition “Warren Perry should not have been around these children” from the proposition “people who commit sexual offenses are best kept behind bars.”
The first may prove entirely correct on these facts. The second does not follow from it.
One of The SOLAR Project's core advocacy positions is straightforward:
“One-size-fits-all registry laws are fundamentally flawed.”
Blanket restrictions ignore differences in conduct, circumstances, treatment, time elapsed and actual risk. SOLAR argues instead for policy that is individualized, reviewable and evidence-based.
If evidence shows that Warren Perry lied to probation, concealed relevant information, violated his restrictions or presents a danger around children, make decisions about Warren Perry on that evidence. What does not logically follow is that Warren Perry's offense label tells us everything necessary to know about every other person who shares it.
The proper response to evidence that Warren Perry poses a danger is to respond to Warren Perry—not to turn his offense label into a theory of human nature.
That distinction is the difference between risk assessment and stigma.
SOLAR's RECON initiative—Register Every Convict or None—was created to expose precisely this kind of selective logic. RECON is not a proposal to put everyone convicted of a crime on a public registry. It is a consistency test.
If lifelong public branding and categorical restrictions are genuinely indispensable to public safety because people who have committed serious crimes may pose future risks, then the principle should survive being applied beyond sex offenses. If society immediately recoils when the same logic is applied to other crimes, then perhaps the principle was never really about risk in the first place. The SOLAR Project's advocacy framework
Parker's “behind bars” maxim fails the same test.
If yes: she has articulated an extraordinarily expansive theory of incarceration that bears little resemblance to the individualized criminal-justice principles she defended in the Colin Gray case.
If no: then she owes readers the argument she never supplies: what is it about a sexual conviction that causes proportionality, individual culpability, rehabilitation, judicial discretion and differentiated risk to stop mattering?
“Sexual abuse is terrible” is not an answer. We already agree. The question is what follows from that fact.
Perhaps the strangest part of Parker's conclusion is that she invokes Christianity. The controversy arose at a church. Its former pastor defended the decision to permit Perry to volunteer in part through a Christian vocabulary of human dignity and forgiveness, while also claiming that Perry was not supposed to be alone with children. WPDE
Those are not inherently contradictory beliefs. Forgiveness does not require abandoning safeguards, nullifying probation conditions or preventing accountability for deception or misconduct. A society can punish wrongdoing without declaring the person who committed it permanently incapable of change.
Parker collapses those separate propositions into one aphorism in which forgiveness remains theoretically available—provided its recipient remains incarcerated.
What would rehabilitation have to look like before Kathleen Parker would recognize it?
Completion of treatment? Perfect compliance with supervision? Ten offense-free years? Twenty? Thirty? Advanced age? A professional assessment of low risk? Stable employment and relationships? Nothing?
There are really only two categories of answer.
If something could eventually demonstrate that a person no longer belongs behind bars, Parker has conceded the principle she abandons in this column: People must ultimately be judged as individuals.
If nothing could ever be enough, then “forgiveness” is doing no meaningful work in her formulation. A person may be forgiven in the abstract but never trusted, never restored, never judged anew and never permitted to become anything other than “the predator.”
That is not a theory of rehabilitation. It is a theory of permanent moral caste.
I started here thinking Parker was being hypocritical. After reading her other work, I think that diagnosis was incomplete.
Parker knows how individualized justice works. Her own writing proves it. She has argued that horrifying consequences do not erase distinctions among people, that punishment should correspond to what an individual actually did, and that even people convicted of very serious crimes can change, rehabilitate and eventually reenter society in ways that improve public safety.
Yet when the subject becomes a sexual offense, those principles disappear. A possession conviction becomes “the predator.” An alleged probation violation becomes evidence that probation itself was misplaced. The possibility of lifelong harm becomes an argument for incarceration. And rehabilitation gives way to the certainty of a prison cell.
Parker may believe sex offenses justify different treatment. She is entitled to make that case. But different is not the same as categorical, and emotional revulsion is not a substitute for the missing argument.
If justice requires distinctions when children are killed with a rifle, it requires distinctions when children are sexually exploited. If rehabilitation remains possible for people convicted of some of society's worst crimes, Parker must explain why a sexual conviction extinguishes it.
Perhaps the problem is that Parker has confused justice with a cell.
Those are not the same thing. And no amount of clever phrasing can make them so.
- Kathleen Parker's July 24 Washington Post column — Pawleys Island church column
- South Carolina Legislature — S.C. Code § 16-15-410
- WMBF News — What we know about the suspects in the Pawleys Island Community Church investigation
- Fox Carolina — How South Carolina supervises sex offenders on probation
- WCJB — Charges in the Pawleys Island church case
- Kathleen Parker's March 5 Washington Post column — Colin Gray column
- Reuters — Colin Gray sentencing
- Associated Press — Judge distinguishes Colin Gray's conduct from his son's
- Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post — Rehabilitation at Lee Correctional Institution
- WPDE — Background on the Pawleys Island Community Church case
- The SOLAR Project — Advocacy and policy positions