Mega-selling author John Grisham isn’t afraid to ask the tough questions when it comes to child porn. For instance: Why are society and the judicial system so hard on old white dudes who want to get wasted and look at underage girls?
“We have prisons now filled with guys my age. Sixty-year-old white men in prison who’ve never harmed anybody, would never touch a child,” he told the Telegraph in an interview intended to promote his upcoming novel, Gray Mountain.
The decision to include the “white” qualifier in that sentence is baffling, but let’s allow him to continue:
“But they got online one night and started surfing around, probably had too much to drink or whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons, went too far and got into child porn.”
Grisham’s opinions about excessive sentencing stem from the case of a “good buddy from law school” who got drunk and got nabbed by a Canadian child porn sting operation:
“His drinking was out of control, and he went to a website. It was labelled ‘sixteen year old wannabee hookers or something like that’. And it said ’16-year-old girls’. So he went there. Downloaded some stuff – it was 16 year old girls who looked 30.
“He shouldn’t ’a done it. It was stupid, but it wasn’t 10-year-old boys. He didn’t touch anything. And God, a week later there was a knock on the door: ‘FBI!’ and it was sting set up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to catch people – sex offenders – and he went to prison for three years.”
Grisham goes on to draw a big thick line between touchers and lookers, accurately calling the former group “pedophiles” while outright refusing to refer to the latter as “perverts.”
Oh touchers: “I have no sympathy for real pedophiles. God, please lock those people up”
On lookers: “There’s so many of them now. There’s so many ‘sex offenders’ – that’s what they’re called – that they put them in the same prison. Like they’re a bunch of perverts, or something.”