Controversially, it seems, I have more of a problem with rape sentencing than I do with the personnel decisions of Oldham Athletic football club. I think rape sentencing is far too lenient. Come to that, I think all manner of sentences are out of whack. Why in the name of sanity and proportion should small-time “canoe man” insurance fiddler John Darwin have got six years when there are paedophiles who get three – or less?

I don’t see any petitions on rape sentencing, unfortunately – an absence that adds to a nagging sense about this latest chapter in the Great Outrage Wars: that clicktivism, and feminist clicktivism too often, is overly preoccupied with fighting the battles it can win relatively easily, rather than the much more ambitious ones it should try to win. Is it aspirational to want to live in a country where football – football! – is expected to mitigate the fact that the law is an ass? I know the longest journey starts with a single step, or whatever the puppy poster peeling off your dentist’s wall says, but the relentless focus on explaining why a footballer is not covered by the idea of paying his debt to society via the criminal justice system is both irrational and increasingly concerning.

A principle isn’t a principle until it is tested, so it is said. For a worrying amount of people, the belief that debts to society are paid via the corrections system seems to have found its limit in the case of Ched Evans, which makes one wonder just how muddled their philosophising has got. Or how important League One has become – do take your pick between these bizarre options.

Before we go on, some things must be underscored. I have the utmost sympathy for the woman whom Evans was found guilty of raping, and nothing but total contempt for the scumbags whose naming her on the internet has reportedly caused her to change her identity five times, and who should be hunted down by the law and brought to justice. Nine have already been convicted, and I wish the police luck getting all the rest. Furthermore, I think the website funded by Ched Evans’s fiancee’s father is toxically pathetic and disgusting, and – as my colleague David Conn has pointed out – misleading and probably unlawful in parts. I never thought the repulsive Evans should return to Sheffield United, because no one else walks back into their same job after a rape conviction.

But the idea that all clubs should be stopped from signing him – because, you know, football – is wrongheaded. Upon what is it based? That Ched Evans being allowed to take a job – any job – in football will “send a message” to people evidently too stupid to regard it as anything other than an endorsement of his behaviour? Ah, if only the sort of people who watch football weren’t too thick to see Ched Evans returning to work in football as anything other than an endorsement of rape culture. But they aren’t – or at least, so it would seem from the welter of comment explaining why, in this instance, previously valued principles do not apply. Ched Evans: just another thing that must be banned, because people are too stupid or impressionable to be exposed to him and make intelligent judgments.

Perversely, his most vocal detractors are now doing more to make him a wildly miscast role model than his supporters. Certainly, idiots will rally round him. There are always idiots. Ched Evans masks will be worn. Goals will be celebrated. But he won’t be part of any club’s kid-related community projects, because he’d fail the CRB check. (Incidentally, do remember that much of the reason footballers are so always insistently referred to as role models is because that status allows newspapers to write about their private lives.)

At time of writing, Oldham Athletic were reconsidering their offer to him, so one can’t say how this latest episode will pan out. But while we wait, it’s worth wondering for a moment how different various aspects of culture would have looked over the past few decades had the recourse to insta-outrage been the same as it is today.

Leslie Grantham would certainly never have been Dirty Den on EastEnders for instance. Four days after Grantham hit the screen as the landlord of the Queen Vic in 1985, the Mirror revealed that he’d done 10 years for the murder of a West German taxi driver, and if you think the internet would have permitted him to remain as the anti-hero of the BBC’s flagship soap in this day and age, then you need your connection checked.

Tens of thousands of people complained to the BBC about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s calls to Andrew Sachs – and that was in the years before they were Twitter-enabled – so you can imagine what sort of outrage-tide the corporation hiring a convicted murderer would nowadays unleash. BBC soap actors are role models, I expect, and the message Grantham’s hiring sent would simply not be permitted to be sent today. It would be regarded as too wantonly dangerous.

And yet, we all survived the alternative version of history, somehow. People were able to separate the BBC’s personnel decision from an endorsement of murder or a culture of violence. Very possibly, people were not even aware that prominent BBC actors were role models, just as they probably did not know back then that they were supposed to take their moral lead from footballers. Thank heavens for progress.