RICH LOWRY: Atticus Finch Was on the Wrong Side.

To Kill a Mockingbird stands firmly for the proposition that an accusation can be false, that unpopular defendants presumed guilty must and should be defended, and that it is admirable and brave to withstand the crowd — at times in the story, literally the lynch mob — when it wants to cast aside the normal protections of justice.

Exactly what has made Atticus Finch such an honored figure in our culture would make him a very inconvenient man at many college campuses today, where charges of sexual misconduct are adjudicated without the accused being allowed to confront the accuser or make use of other key features of our system of justice. Finch is a rebuke to the shift from a presumption of innocence toward a presumption of guilt that now attends accusations of sexual harassment and assault. He didn’t believe that someone’s being accused of something is enough to establish his wrongdoing, or accept that a category of people were, by definition, to be under a pall of suspicion.

Atticus Finch is not the man for this moment, but we need him, and his reasoned yet unshakable commitment to fairness and justice, more than ever.

He’s right — though Glenn and Ashe Schow were onto Finch risking being perceived by the #MeToo crowd as “American literature’s most celebrated rape apologist” nearly four years ago.