The Wrong Hammer
I object to the way stories about Franken have driven him to resign as his Senatorial colleagues want. The “sex harassment” hammer sees everything as a one-size nail.
I also object to the fact the some Republicans, and most Democrats, think Roy Moore shouldn’t be elected because he tried to date teenagers. When bad people do bad things, it’s important to prioritize. Moore’s done far worse than this 40 year old sleaze. His heinous acts as judge and candidate have and could hurt hundreds and thousands of people.
First, Franken. His worst crime, it seems, was trying to kiss a woman. She didn’t want to be kissed. He tried again, perhaps, and she pushed back. He stopped and said that he did it because he’s an entertainer.
Most men have tried to kiss a woman and have been rebuffed. It usually happens when you’re dating. It often happens when you’re young. It happens in cars and on doorsteps. Men don’t read minds. They try to kiss. The woman may turn her head, maybe gives a shove. Most men get the message. It’s embarrassing.
It happens the other way, too, but less often. Women try to kiss a man, and it doesn’t go well. It happens in same-sex relationships. But it happens most often with men trying to kiss women. People say dumb things when they’re rejected. Like ‘I tried because I’m an entertainer.’
Of course if the man is a woman’s boss, her mentor, producer, teacher, director, or considerably older, then trying to kiss her is harassment. If they’ve just met, it’s clearly out of place. But it takes specific power dynamics to make a failed kiss a kiss of death for someone’s career or lifestyle.
We don’t know the nature of Franken’s relationship with the woman he tried to kiss. That’s too bad, because we don’t need to know the woman’s name, only her age, position, and so forth. But we do know that Franken wasn’t her boss. It doesn’t appear she risked much by denying his kiss. It discomforted her, although we don’t know if that was because he’s married, didn’t know her sufficiently, was too old, or other reasons. She reported, according to Politico, that what bothered her most, later, was that Franken criticized Trump for the Access Hollywood tape. Trump said he grabs and kisses women he doesn’t know, and grabs their genitals.
Franken, however, had spent time with the woman before he tried to kiss her. More importantly, although Trump’s claims of kissing are awful, especially because he targeted women 40 or 50 years his junior, it’s his pussy grabbing that should have got him fired. The woman who accused Franken of hypocrisy compared apples and oranges, if she thinks Franken couldn’t criticize Trump because they both kissed women too freely. The protesters at the women’s march didn’t wear kissing hats. They wore pussy hats.
The bottom line is that trying to kiss a woman isn’t a capital offense. It can’t be, because most men try it. They may feel they must, to find out if a woman they’re interested in has romantic interest too. For a kiss to be something worth getting in trouble for, it has to carry some other intent, like be a threat, an insult, a violation of trust, or be repugnant. It’s possible Franken’s effort to kiss the woman was one of these things. But all we know is that he tried to kiss.
Of course, some people are easily insulted, are quick to feel violated, or get disgusted a lot. They have every right to feel as they do. Many men have tried to finish a date with a kiss, as have quite a few women, only to find the other person is horrified. We can’t just judge a kiss by one person’s outrage, unless there are sufficient facts for us to judge.
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In Franken’s case, there aren’t. As for squeezing the occasional woman’s butt, while her husband photographs … making that a crime would throw a lot of baseball players in jail. We don’t live in a fairy tale utopia. Right now, Congress will pass, and Trump will sign, legislation that will kill people, by making health care unavailable, or causing a financial bubble that leads to immiseration. That’s more important than squeezed butts.
Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate, is different. He pursued underage girls in the 1970s. That’s bad. But Moore’s baddness isn’t news. He’s an ignorant, hateful, corrupt person, twice removed from the bench by his conservative peers. Anyone who supported Moore before the stories of his sexuality were publicized was already supporting someone who shows antipathy for the law, the Constitution, people of different faiths, different ethnicity. They supported a man who wants to criminalize homosexuality, bar Muslims from holding office, end civil rights prosecutions, and uses religion the same way extremists do. He’s a grandstanding hater. They rallied around someone who should be ignored, if not despised.
That it took his puerile pursuit of teens to get Moore in trouble is a damning sign, given the widespread social damage he has done and risk he poses to all. It’s almost to Moore’s advantage to have the spotlight turned on his long-past sexual misdeeds, because they are long past, and it’s his recent political activity that should be scrutinized.
As horrible as Moore is, Alabamans ‘in the know’ have been aware of Moore’s past over many elections. Hitler was in his 40s when he dated a 17 year old. Does anyone believe this was the reason to object to Hitler’s power? If Alabamans will elect a man who ignored the law as a judge, relying instead on what he claimed God told him, does it matter than he chased teenagers? He’s rotten.
Incidentally, a person who has sex with a person under 17 commits a criminal act. It is not pedophilia. That’s a psychosis, which requires wanting sex with children of very young age. Calling Moore a pedophile is untrue. If he was, it would be a sickness. Instead he’s evil, a moral choice.
Franken and Moore couldn’t be more different. But we misperceive both through the lens of sexual harassment. Franken is probably too big for his britches, like all other 99 Senators. But it hasn’t been shown that his attempt to kiss someone was done with malice, damaged a career, humiliated or disempowered, or involved a woman whose age or other attributes demonstrated he was dangerous. Gillibrand, the Democratic Senator who first demanded Franken step down, started her career as a lawyer defending tobacco companies. I consider that far worse that trying to kiss someone.
Moore is a person whose long-past indiscretions are not even close to the most immoral things he’s done. He’s dangerous, so if those indiscretions are what Alabamans, and Americans more generally, pay attention to, perhaps that’s good enough reason to trumpet them. But Alabamans, and Americans more generally, have lost their moral compass if they think that’s the worst part of Moore.
What should we pay attention to? In today’s news, it turns out the US, under Trump, has begun deporting Somali refugees back to Somalia. These are people who’ve lived in America for 10 or 20 years, with careers, family, roots. They have a good chance of getting killed when they go back to a war-torn zone, where the whiff of Americanism is a big target. Not a handful, but hundreds are deported. This happened today. Of course if they were from a European country in a civil war, they’d be left alone. Somalis don’t look enough like us to say “me too.”
Weinstein, Ailes, and the other power brokers who forced women to have sex, statutory rape, are criminals for all seasons. Weinstein should have been put on trial long ago. He was too powerful before, which is more or less Trump’s defense. Weinstein and Ailes weren’t brought down by #metoo. They got too old, and lost invulnerability.
By forcing out Franken, the #metoo movement has been weaponized. What Congress does (and doesn’t do) matters. With Franken pushed out so easily, Democrats have become more vulnerable. Next election cycle, expect claims to pop up, which people will compare to Franken’s. Operatives must be rubbing their hands. After all, at least some of Franken’s accusers are active Trump supporters. This may have been hit #1.
And the reality of Senator Moore will be on display, as he yanks his party towards demonic policies. Take him down on his sexual immorality, but recognize that denying rights, due process, and Constitutional protections, and aiding the KKK, are even bigger crimes.
