Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think anyone here was saying that we should reduce people to a two-dimensional caricature of themselves. I think the point that was trying to be made was that, this is something people should know about before they decided to unreservedly push this man as a saviour or as a hero, and that giving this knowledge to people allows them to decide how they feel about it, whether they are comfortable with it, and ult…
I appreciate the nuanced response and I also believe you're also coming from a place of compassion here too. I agree to an extent, but I think it is too easy to take a nasty turn in this age of information overload. It's very easy to cherry pick salacious details and run with them, knowing that people will take it at face value. I'm absolutely not accusing anyone here of doing that, and in part I'm not responding to…
See: Dan Harmon's apology which so easily disproves this :) In the case of Connery, it would have been easy for him to push his PR people to publicly denounce the video, do a few interviews, and donate some token sum of a couple of thousand to the relevant charities. I remember (But unfortunately can't cite) some other people who have then gone on to be advocates for these causes as a form of penance. As a celebrity, pretty much anything like this is newsworthy, if not, he doesn't have good PR people and should fire them and hire new ones, because they aren't effective enough for his purposes :P
> Or can we imagine that people may change even without making a public song and dance about it?
I mean, he stated it publicly in the first place, so obviously he thought at the time that that public statement on that was worth his salt. Assuming he had reformed and then gone on to improve his perspectives, it seems unlikely that from then on he would be unaware of the harm that that video, still in perpetuity, could cause and want to undo that to some extent.
Reforming isn't possible on a personal level, because we (and I'm sorry for this so heavily memed statement) live in a community. On a fundamental level our public statements take on a life of their own, and because we made them, we should have responsibility for them. From then on, that statement can do untold harm or benefit. Such is the way of living in a community, where your actions will affect other people. Part of reforming yourself is attempting to undo the damage that you have caused in the past. And so part of that reformation would inherently have to be, retracting or attempting to undo the damage caused by those public statements.
A different way to put this would be: Is it possible to reform yourself and not try to undo the damage of your past actions in some way? Are you truly reformed if you wave your hand and do not take responsibility for them?