'The fact that a politician can emote such garbage is disturbing.' The problem, as he sees it, was “I mean sincerely, a bunch of white guys hearing this testimony”.
Anita Hill, said Joe, deserved to be respected for not becoming hostile at the tone of the questioning, and for her act of stepping forward to be recognised as an act of courage. Joe claimed “she paid a terrible price. She was abused through the hearing, she was taken advantage of, her reputation was attacked”, he also suggested that her career was damaged.
Anita Hill’s allegations were salacious (to the point of absurdity) – she claimed not only that Clarence Thomas repeatedly asked her to socialise with him outside of work but that he ignored her clear disgust, insisting on detailing scenes he’d seen in porn, involving such acts as bestiality and rape.
She gave the Senate the names of two corroborating witnesses – both rejected any knowledge of the harassment she alleged, one even testified for Thomas. I was three years old in 1991 – so I didn’t watch the hearing then, and I still haven’t but if this short video hosted by CNN is anything to go by, Hill was not abused by the Senate, she was cross-examined.
Her position teaching at Oklahoma University did apparently become unpopular with conservative state legislators who pushed for her to be forced to resign but she continued teaching there for six years. She then accepted a position as a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at University of California, Berkeley in January 1997, later moving to Brandeis University—first at the Women’s Studies Program, then the Heller School for Social Policy and Management.
In 2011, she took a counsel position with the Civil Rights & Employment Practice group of the plaintiffs’ law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll. She also took up a book deal upwards of a million dollars in 1993 and has been a regular feature in print and on T.V. So, for all that her career may have been damaged, the benefits of her courage seem to have paid off big time.
Joe marked out 1991 as a period of time wherein cultural bias informed society that “if a woman was harassed, she must have done something to deserve it”, and exhorted that the experience of Christine Blasey-Ford show that little has changed. He said that it still takes courage to testify against a nominated Supreme Court Judge and that the experiences of Hill and Blasey-Ford will discourage other women from coming forward. It’s not at all clear to me that the barrier preventing these accusers from destroying the careers of their alleged harassers was that anyone felt that harassed women “must have done something to deserve it”.
I would posit that actually the barrier was the fact that only the (blindly) “believe her” crowd actually believed the totally unsubstantiated (if politically convenient) claims that either woman made. Which is as it should be, especially in legal proceedings. And hey, Joe, don’t fret – perhaps the half a million dollars that Blasey-Ford raked in, in crowd-funding campaigns in the space of about a week may encourage other women to make allegations some?
Finally, Joe got to the crux of the matter: “We all have an obligation to do nothing less than change the culture in this country… English jurisprudential culture. A white man’s culture. It’s got to change”. The man is a racist and misandric enemy of genuine justice as well as a sycophantic flagellator at the altar of social justice.
Not only that but he’s a damn liar who pulled out the old myth that the phrase “rule of thumb” is a remnant of an old English common-law that stated that men were only entitled to beat their wives with rods no wider than their thumbs – in fact there is no evidence for this until second wave feminists invented it. It was in all likelihood a phrase that emerged from the practice of using thumbs to estimate lengths, distances and alignments. But seriously, English jurisprudence is one of white-man’s greatest gifts to the world and the subversion of it by social justice activists is one of white-man’s greatest crimes.
The fact that a politician can emote such garbage is disturbing, as have been developments like campus kangaroo courts – but I don’t think it should be too much cause for alarm. I think the man has way overplayed his hand, just like the campus activists did. The public are waking up and voting against the social justice culture that has shamed them into compliance for so long. And furthermore, I suspect that the wolves with whom Joe is dining with will soon devour him.
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