Moore, Franken, and the New Politics of Sex

Sexual harassment, discrimination, and assault are wrong.  But there is a difference between accusations of the three and guilt.  Yet in a post-HarveyWeinstein world, we are dangerously close to treating accusations as guilt, pushing our culture into another Salem witch hunt or McCarthy era that will damage many individuals, permanently labeling them as modern day witches or communists who can do nothing to prove their innocence or redeem themselves.
Fear and prejudice has led America to do many ugly things.  It all started in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.  Told brilliantly by Arthur in the Crucible, 20 individuals–14 of which were women–were accused of being witches, and hung or died as a result of the accusations.  Those accused were done so because they were unpopular, or scapegoats given up by those who wished to blame others for offenses they were accused of and were able to save themselves by implicating others.
Salem is the story of the ugly side of American society.  Overtime we have had many Salems.  The city and its witch hunts are the backdrops for Miller’s Crucible, written at the height of the McCarthy era in the 1950s, where congressional hearings and the question “are you now or have you ever been a member  of the community party?” denounced individuals as guilty simply by accusation or invocation of the right to remain silent.  Thousands lost their jobs, Hollywood decimated, often because they held views, joined organizations, or supported causes, sometimes many years earlier, which some deemed objectionable.
Some will claim false equivalence in  equivocating sexual harassment, discrimination, and assault with accusations of being a witch or communist.  Witches don’t exist and the McCarthy era  was about an attack on the First Amendment.  But Salem and witches are metaphors.  Many live in Salems–closed communities or bubbles of like-minded people who fear outsiders and condemn  them with nary a hint of real evidence of something heinous.  It is guilt unless improbably they prove their innocence.  It is judging someone as evil regardless of the gravity of the action simply because they did something objectionable somewhere or sometime in their life, regardless of the circumstances.
For nearly 20 years I have taught professional ethics.  Among the questions I ask is how to we judge the relationship between the personal and professional role of public officials?  Can one be an ethical Senator, for example, even if one is not so in his private life?  Or what if someone did something wrong years ago–perhaps at a time before they held office–should that action continue to define their character for the rest of their life or career?  At one point does something we did perhaps in our youth years ago define who we are today, rendering us unfit to serve?
None of us are angels.  We are all human and make mistakes. Yet to let one mistake condemn us to purgatory or hell may be wrong.  At some point what one did, when, why, how many times, and how matters.  How and whether it interconnects our personal and professional lives are matters of judgment and fine moral distinctions.  We also need to distinguish between bad acts and what the philosopher Aristotle labeled habits of character which define who we are.  Judge based not necessarily on one or several mistakes but on how they define a person’s overall character.
There is a moral or ethical difference between crude sexual jokes and sexual assault and treating them all as equally disqualifying for office does a disservice to how we judge culpability for bad behavior.  There needs also to be recognition of the changing standards of conduct that define the ethics of actions. There is a slippery slope here.  At one time being gay, divorced, having an affair, or even smoking a joint were considered damning grounds to exclude one from public office or declare one to be a witch.   Yes, sexual assault and discrimination should always have been wrong, and the same might be said of sexually offensive gestures or statements.    But in some cases it may be unfair to judge people by contemporary standards for actions that occurred along time ago when standards were different, or when individuals were young, immature, or simply different people from whom they are now.
Portia in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice declares that “The quality of mercy is not strain'd,” Forgiveness is our better virtue in many cases.  Our society and prisons are jammed with many people whom we  refuse to forgive, condemning them for life for mistakes that they have  made at one time in their life, perhaps long ago.  Might as a society it be more just and fair we give some a second chance?  Might as a society we be more just and fair and not jump on the bandwagon and condemn equally all who said or did something we find offensive.  There are powerful differences among what Roy Moore, Al Franken, Donald Trump, and others did, or allegedly did, as well as what many in Hollywood are accused of.  Treating them all the same–as witches with equal culpability –is too crude of a way to address the problems of sexual harassment, discrimination, and assault in our society.

The Paranoid Style of Michele Bachmann

“In my opinion the State Department, which is one of the most important government departments, is thoroughly infested with communists.” –Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1950.

 

“Information has recently come to light that raises serious questions about Department of State policies and activities that appear to be a result of influence operations conducted by individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood."  –Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, 2012.

    Fear and prejudice make people do stupid things.

    *    In 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, fear of the new world and prejudice against the unknown resulted in the deaths of 24 people—19 hung, four dying in prison, and one crushed to death—all because they were accused of being witches. The story is told well in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible—a banned book.

    *    During WWI and the Depression 30s, fears arising out of hunger and desperation and prejudice against hope for a better life led to raids, beatings, and imprisonment for union members and those who wished to advocate for their political views.

    *    After Pearl Harbor, fear and prejudice against the Japanese led to the forcible relocation and internment of over125,000 loyal Americans into concentration camps.

    *    In the 1950s, fear of the Soviets and prejudice against those who saw the world differently from Senator Joe McCarthy were subject to communist witch hunts and Hollywood blacklists that led to the loss of life and livelihood of thousands.

    *    And in civil rights protests in the 1960s, and at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, fear and prejudice against those advocating equal rights for Blacks and gays were treated to beatings and police brutality.

    Then there is Michele Bachmann who seems to be cornering the market on fear and prejudice with her defamatory remarks about Congressman Keith Ellison and Huma Abedin as being members of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Bachmann’s latest accusations are so ugly and dirty that even Republicans such as John McCain and Speaker John Boehner are condemning them.  Her comments  and accusations about Muslims and the State Department take a page from Senator McCarthy’s comments about Communists and the State Department in 1950.
    America is a beautiful nation, often filled with hope and promise of a better life for us and our children. Yet this country has an ugly side to it that we often forget and ignore.  It is the story of America as told so well by Richard Hofstadter in his The Paranoid Style of American Politics. We often cloak fear and prejudice in the flag and persecute minorities or blame individual liberties as the cause of our insecurities.  If only the government had more power or authority, if only people had less rights, some promise, then we could root out witches, communists, disloyal Americans, homosexuals,  immigrants, terrorists, and Muslims and make the country safe for the rest of us God-fearing Christian Americans.
    Yet Bachmann’s recent attacks are only the most recent episode of her appeal to fear, prejudice, and ignorance. Recall again her 2012 presidential candidacy.  After a first place victory in the August, 2011 Iowa straw poll, she was on top of the world.  Yet she suddenly fell from political grace.  Yes the entrance of Texas Governor Rick Perry hurt her campaign by carving into her political base, but it was also her comments about vaccines that doomed her.  In a September 12, 2001 presidential debate Bachmann criticized Perry for an executive order he issued mandating that all sixth-grade girls be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV) as a measure to prevent cervical cancer.  Bachmann’s criticism was that such an order was an overreach of government authority and an infringement upon individual liberty.  This is a fair criticism.  But she continued her attack the next day on the NBC Today Show.  Describing her conversation with a woman after the debate Bachmann recounted:  “She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. There is no second chance for these little girls if there is any dangerous consequences to their bodies.”.
    Bachmann’s repeating of the urban legend that vaccines cause cognitive problems—retardation—was swiftly condemned by the medical community.  The source of this claim was a long discredited and doctored study that purported to find this link.  The medical evidence was significant—there was no connection and instead one could argue, as Governor Perry had correctly suggested in the debate, that HPV and other vaccines would be medically beneficial and would better promote public health than not getting the vaccine.  Yet because of this urban legend connecting vaccines with autism, parents were refusing to inoculate their children.
    Bachmann’s repeating and apparent embrace of this myth was roundly criticized.  Suddenly she looked like some type of crackpot, ready to embrace outlandish and fringe ideas.  Some might have concluded that Michele Bachmann believes the world is flat, the Earth is at the center of a universe God created on the evening of Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC (according to calculations by Medieval Bishop James Ussher), and that Elvis is still alive and well and living in hiding somewhere, thereby explaining why she wished him happy birthday on the anniversary of his alleged death.
    Bachmann boiled a cauldron of fringe views and crank beliefs. She was often criticized for factual inaccuracies in many claims, ranging from assertions that the American Constitutional framers freed the slaves (they did not) to the claim that Dodd-Frank (the bill passed in 2010 to regulate Wall Street financial transactions to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) have already lead to the loss of millions of American jobs or increased health care costs despite the fact that most of the major provisions of both had yet to go into effect.  She also simply and repeatedly made other assertions that were simply wrong or widely exaggerated.  Louis Jacobson of Polifact points out that Bachmann through 2010 had earned five “Pants on Fire” on the Truth-O-Meter and has never scored better than “false” in her five truth tests.  She is the hall of famer of political lies and inaccuracies.
    I am not sure what is worse.  Is she lying for political advantage?  Is she that ignorant about  facts and history?  Is she dumb, lying, or appealing to prejudice?  Neither of these explanations are praiseworthy.  With the comments about the Muslim brotherhood I am not sure if her main failing  is the falsehood about Ellison and Abedin or equating being Muslim with being un-American?
    Joseph McCarthy’s end came in 1952 whenJoseph Welch, Special Counsel to the Army asked of him in a hearing:  “Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
    I wonder the same about Bachmann.  Maybe the turning point came this week when Senator  John McCain declared: "When anyone, not least a member of Congress, launches specious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of what they stand for, it defames the spirit of our nation, and we all grow poorer because of it.”