"How should we weigh the past bad deeds of a 19-year-old running for public office" is maybe not a question that lends itself particularly well to extrapolating fundamental principles from.
"What you did when you were 13 shouldn't dog you throughout your life as a politician" is a sensible, intuitively compelling statement. But most politicians aren't still in their teens.
On the flipside, "a man who viciously sexually harassed multiple people in the recent past must be held accountable" is obviously right, but what "held accountable" looks like becomes less intuitive if the harassment took place when the man was in middle school.
My reactions to what Aaron Coleman did in his early teens, how he's handling the current scandal, and the prospect of his holding elective office in the very near future are all powerfully negative. But they're specific to HIM as an individual.
To suggest that if Coleman, at 19, is held to account for what he did when he was 13, the result will be a dramatic reduction in candidates for public office is absurd. Both because very few 13-year-olds do what he did AND because very few 19-year-olds run for office.
And to suggest that this incident is somehow representative of cancel culture run amok is again absurd, precisely because the whole situation is such an outlier. There's no slippery slope here—the landscape around this story is pancake-flat for ten miles in every direction.
