Here’s the thing: In association with several of this week’s columns, I’ve made comments on what I think should happen in relation to instances of sexual harassment.
Mostly I’ve done so because it is, of course, the story of the moment. Beyond that, in a very real way it’s the story of the century, maybe the turning of a big wheel with a very big span. The story of the disparity in power between men and women, and how that difference has been exploited to the advantage of men, is the Story of Humanity, ugly edition.
If that wheel is turning now — and “if” is still, unfortunately, the correct conjunction — then that’s a wondrous thing. Something to be celebrated. But also likely to be painful, loud, and even violent. It’s still worth it.
So … I’ve dared to have an opinion on this subject, and yeah, it’s one that focuses on seeing that while that wheel turns, it doesn’t grind down everyone indiscriminately. Because it seems like we’d all — big “We,” men and women alike — benefit if the punishment of sexual harassment is clear, consistent, and appropriate. If that sounds like a round-about version of “not all men,” then … it probably is. I hope not. But probably. Feel free to sneer. Hell, feel free to stop reading and start screaming.
Like many men, I’ve spent the last few weeks in a much-needed review, running back the tape of my life and pulling out wince-worthy moments for a very unpleasant examination. There’s a lot of pretty damn awful stuff down there, much of which proves just how immature, how inconsiderate, and how full of shit I’ve been in relationships with women. Some of it comes from a long delayed realization that it’s possible to be just as driven by infatuation at forty as at fourteen, even when — maybe especially when — the object of said infatuation is simply baffled by the attention.
In conducting my review, I don’t believe I’ve found any instances that would constitute harassment in the “in the news” sense. No points where I physically grabbed a woman, where I planted an unwanted kiss, or said things that would perpetuate a a poisonous environment. At least … I’m pretty sure that’s been true since I ceased being a teenager. And maybe even then.
But … yeah, here’s the awful “but.” But I’m not sure. Worse, I’m probably wrong. I probably have done something that caused someone to not just feel uncomfortable, but to feel affronted, wronged, belittled, sexualized, and just plain miserable. I’ve probably done that … and I don’t remember. I’m sorry. Not just sorry for the things I worry I may have done, but sorry that I did them with so little concern that they didn’t even get a recording on the scratchy 8-track recording of my memory.
And you know how much my “sorry” is worth? Yeah, that much.
Come on inside anyway. Let’s read some pundits.
Leonard Pitts on the continuation of the Trump Trot.
… As seen in the 2016 campaign, it’s his go-to move. Trump, the favored candidate of David Duke, challenged Hillary Clinton to address her “racist” 2008 campaign. Trump, king of the ad hominem insult, complained of opponents being “nasty” and “angry” toward him. Trump, who bragged about being a grabber of pudenda, condemned Bill Clinton’s abuse of women. And so on.
Once you get that this is his favorite tactic, you get why last week’s announcement that the Justice Department is considering a special counsel to look into Clinton’s supposed collusion with Russia was predestined.
Creating a second special counsel has benefits for Trump beyond just sowing confusion and distraction — in this case, it also gives Trump an opportunity to come at Robert Mueller from a new direction. But that’s typical of Trump’s tactics, as well. They’re not random flailings. They’re often jaw-droppingly obvious assaults on common sense, common courtesy, or tradition.
You see, there’s no obvious crime here. The allegation is that Clinton, as secretary of state, approved a deal for a Russian firm to purchase shares in Uranium One, a Canadian mining company with operations in the United States, in exchange for a more than $140 million donation to the Clinton Foundation.
But Clinton didn’t green light the deal; she had no power to do so. Rather, it was approved unanimously by a nine-agency committee of which State was a member. As for the supposed quid pro quo, the vast majority of the money — over $130 million — came from a single Uranium One investor. He says he had no connection to the company at the time, having sold his shares 18 months before Clinton even took office.
The pointlessness of launching an investigation into the Uranium One deal and any connection to Hillary has been well documented. But of course, the whole thing is an excuse for both Republican-led congressional committees and Trump’s theoretical counsel to make Mueller a witness in an endless, directionless investigation based on his involvement in investigating Uranium One eight years ago. That gives Trump the satisfaction of distracting Mueller, the opportunity to throw around plenty of false accusations, and Republicans in general a reason to claim that Mueller “can’t lead an investigation while he’s the subject of an investigation.”
Ruth Marcus ponders the fate of Al Franken.
… A perplexing aspect of the current debate involves the question of what should happen to those guilty of misbehavior and the tendency, common to revolutions, to overcorrect for past sins. If society once ignored sexual harassment — and we certainly did — one risk, now evident with the case of Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), is overcompensating for earlier apathy. The two dangers are not equivalent — ignoring sexual abuse and assault is far worse than punishing its perpetrators too severely.
What Franken did was wrong. That it was Franken is disappointing. But there also has to be some consideration of degree when looking at sexual harassment.
Even so, not all crimes deserve the death penalty. Not all bad behavior warrants expulsion, firing or resignation. The clamor for Franken’s head is, at best, premature — sentence first, trial (or Senate Ethics Committee investigation) later. At worst, it is alarmingly extreme, absent evidence of a pattern or misbehavior in the Senate.
Let us stipulate: Franken behaved like a big, not-so-fat idiot. His behavior was appalling. Under the guise of rehearsing for a skit, he allegedly kissed fellow USO performer Leeann Tweeden against her will, sticking his tongue in her mouth. He posed for a decidedly not funny photograph in which he appears to grope Tweeden’s breasts while she is asleep. Not okay. But also not Roy Moore, Democratic version — or even Bill Clinton, 2017 edition. On the spectrum from predatory to boorish, Moore and Clinton are on one end, Franken closer to the other.
If every act is treated the same, it’s not a movement. It’s an inquisition.
Kathleen Parker demonstrates immediately how poorly the current system works in reacting to this issue.
The challenge for everyone, but especially the media, is to not overwhelm ourselves with trivial pursuits and blind leads. Groping is wrong and bad and awful, but it doesn’t rise to the level of rape as we commonly understand it. And while a forced kiss is disgusting (and you want to brush your teeth forever), it wouldn’t seem to be a life-altering event. If it is, we’re talking about more than groping. … While the debate about these offenses is, one hopes, constructive, there’s a tendency to put all these monkeys in the same barrel. There are notable differences of degree among them, and we should always give consideration to context and other possible extenuating circumstances lest we become blind to fairness and enamored of “justice,” with or without due process.
Sound reasonable? It’s meant to. But what Parker goes on to admit, and seemingly endorse, is that Franken will get punished because Franken admitted his guilt, and because Democrats are willing to condemn his acts. If we had a system where self-confessed murderers got the chair, and those who denied their crime could hold weekly sessions where they sneered at the families of their victims — we would have this system.
What will happen to Trump is probably nothing. He, like Moore, stands only accused. We may not be at a point where recompense is possible for past aggressions, but there can be little doubt that groping, the trend that suddenly defined 2017, is on its way out.
We can hope that the last part of that statement is true. But the first part again suggests that some kind of objective scale is needed, something that compounds both frequency, the relative power level of those involved, and and cringeworthy details of the act to reach an awfulness score. In no small part because that kind of agreed-upon value makes it possible to go after serial abusers like Moore and Trump and not allow them to skate away at the first cry of “See? Hypocrites!”
David Von Drehle and the war we are losing, right now.
The United States and its allies are under attack. The cyberwar we’ve feared for a generation is well underway, and we are losing. This is the forest, and the stuff about Russian election meddling, contacts with the Trump campaign, phony Twitter accounts, fake news on Facebook — those things are trees.
We’ve been worried about a massive frontal assault, a work of Internet sabotage that would shut down commerce or choke off the power grid. And with good reason. The recent exploratory raid by Russian hackers on American nuclear facilities reminds us that such threats are real.
The Russians have committed an act of digital judo, turning our own strengths — the openness of our society, the power of our media — against us. It’s not a new idea. The Soviet Union worked very, very hard to exploit those same factors. We simply failed to realize that the tools we’d created to spread memes of big-eyed kitties and implant a generation of children with the fear of Slenderman could be readily, and effectively, weaponized.
With each passing week, we learn more. Russia and its sympathizers have cranked up the volume on existing political and cultural divisions in the West, like some psychic version of the Stuxnet hack that caused Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to spin so fast they tore themselves to pieces. They’ve exploited the cutting-edge algorithms of Facebook and Google to feed misinformation to Americans most likely to believe and spread it. They have targeted online ads designed to intensify our hottest culture wars: abortion, guns, sexuality, race. They have partnered with WikiLeaks, the supposed paragon of free speech, to insert propaganda into influential Twitter accounts — including @realDonaldTrump. They have created thousands of phony online identities to add heat to political fever swamps.
I’m among those who wrong ringing paeans for Wikileaks, even when there was good reason to think that their quest for openness was a double-edged sword — with no hilt. The idea of a completely open and free Internet, and a democratic society may both be admirable dreams. They may also prove to be incompatible.
And by the way, the reason the Russians were so effective is because they’ve also been very aware, back to Soviet days, of were America’s weaknesses lie. In particular, it doesn’t take much to put a crowbar into racism when the gap is always there.
Elizabeth Williamson on how Donald Trump saved Nobel Prizewinners from embarrassment.
Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama invited America’s Nobel Prize winners to the White House most years, to celebrate their achievements and thank them for their discoveries. This year, the American winners of Nobels in physics, chemistry, economics and physiology were lauded at the Swedish Embassy in Washington.
They received no invitation to meet President Trump.
The White House didn’t give a firm reason for this, using the president’s travel schedule as an excuse. But like scientists, we can hypothesize. Perhaps Mr. Trump, who has canceled the White House Science Fair, appointed a radio talk show host as the Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist and nobody at all as White House science adviser, isn’t big on research’s value to society.
Donald Trump has searched his gut and found that … nope, there is no need for objective research when his subjective tum tum can answer any question.
After all, imagine how intimidating it could be even for celebrated geniuses to match wits with Mr. Trump, who has noted, “I have a very good brain,” and “I’m a very intelligent person.”
And everyone knows you don’t need Fake Science when you’ve got a very good brain. Just ask Trump. He’s tweeted it … on a world-spanning web of computer systems based on programming languages, networking protocols, digital infrastructure, processing technology, transmission technology, display technology, all of it grounded in basic principles of math, logic, and electronics … none of which Trump understands.
Nicholas Kristof on the red blue divide.
As we watch Roy Moore thumping his Bible to defend himself from accusations of child molestation, let me toss out a verbal hand grenade: To some degree, liberals practice the values that conservatives preach.
This is complicated terrain with lots of exceptions, and the recent scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Al Franken underscore that liberals can be skunks as much as anyone else. Yet if one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it’s striking that conservatives champion “family values” even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast, people in blue states don’t trumpet these family values but often seem to do a better job living them.
That’s because, of course, most of the items on Team Red’s list of moral objectives are simply placeholders for hate. If it’s something that can be used to attack people based on sexual orientation, race, or religion — they’re all in. The rest is window dressing.
Christine Emba and the public face of Christianity in 2017.
There was a lot to see: more than $500 million worth of artifacts, interactive exhibits and performance space in a 430,000-square-foot building three blocks from the Capitol. But actual grappling with the Bible and its implications was an afterthought.
In that way, the Museum of the Bible reflects the discouraging state of Christianity — especially evangelicalism — in the United States today. It is lavishly funded and larger than life to the point of performance, often literally. Yet the approach is strangely superficial given the wealth of complexity inherent to its subject. There are dozens of illuminated manuscripts, but it’s unclear whether they’ve been read. …
Yet while the exhibits dutifully touch on past conflicts involving the Bible (it was deployed in defense of and against slavery!) and play up its crowd-pleasing successes (verses from the book of Genesis helped to define human rights!), overall the museum eschews any difficult engagement with issues of the day. A timeline of the Bible in U.S. history conveniently ends in 1963; its role in our debates on sexuality, contraception and abortion are pointedly left undiscussed.
See Jonathan Martin’s comments from last week’s Sunday APR.
The Washington Post on how the tax bill is also Citizens United, Part Two.
Moneyball politics took a great leap forward when the Supreme Court opened the door to campaign contributions from corporations and unions in the 2010 case Citizens United v. FEC. Now the Republican-controlled House has passed a tax bill that, should it become law, would unleash another tidal wave of change. It would permit churches, charities and foundations to engage in candidate-specific politicking and enable donors to reap tax breaks for political contributions for the first time. Congress ought not allow this to happen. …
What the House bill really amounts to is throwing open an entirely new channel for campaign money to politicize churches, charities and foundations. Today, so-called super PACs are a massive force in politics, spending more than $1 billion in the 2016 election cycle. Such super PAC donations must be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission and are not tax-deductible. What if these donors are tempted to give their money to a 501(c)3 organization that beckons with a tax deduction and no disclosure? The givers won’t hold back. Churches and church-affiliated groups generally don’t even have to file IRS returns, so there will be no information about who these contributors are. Other 501(c)3 groups do file, but the donors are not disclosed to the public. The politicized churches, charities and foundations could become the latest vessels for dark-money politics. The House language is not in the Senate legislation, but it could survive to a conference.
The Republican tax bill weaponizes churches to the next explosive source of political funds and rhetoric in a system that hasn’t begun to recover from either the entrance of social media or the money-flood of Citizens United. What could go wrong?
Abby Honold on Franken … and Franken.
In November 2014, I was raped.
I’m certainly not the only one something this awful has happened to, but afterward, I felt as though I was. I was a 19-year-old college student. My life changed overnight. I faced an incredibly long fight to bring my attacker to justice: Daniel Drill-Mellum was wealthy, well-connected, and willing to throw me and my reputation under the bus. The #MeToo culture I’ve seen develop publicly over the last month wasn’t around to help me then. I was nearly harassed off the University of Minnesota campus for reporting. I was turned away by the Minneapolis Police Department despite the mountain of evidence in my case. …
I sought help from Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.). He took up my cause without hesitation, and he worked with his aides to draft legislation to pay for training to help police departments treat assault survivors with more concern for what we’ve been through. But now that allegations have come out that Franken himself assaulted a woman years ago, I want another lawmaker to sponsor the bill we worked so hard on. This work deserves to be led by those without a history of sexual harassment or assault.
No. I’m not about to “correct” Honold … because I’m and idiot. But there are limits.
Randall Balmer on why Roy Moore’s dishonesty is more than mall-cruising deep.
I first encountered Roy Moore in 2002 in a Montgomery, Ala., courtroom, where I was an expert witness on the separation of church and state in what came to be known as the Alabama Ten Commandments case. Moore, then the state’s chief justice, was the defendant. He had installed a granite block emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Judicial Building in Montgomery, declared that the event marked “the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land” and then refused to allow any other religious representations in that public space.
“Roy’s Rock” represented a clear violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, and Moore was being sued for so blatantly flouting the Constitution. He was silent that day in the courtroom, but he had already made a great deal of noise about the United States being a Christian nation. One of his arguments was that the founders were aware of no religion other than Christianity, and therefore, the First Amendment gave only Christians the right to free exercise.
That statement, of course, was demonstrably, ridiculously false. But that’s Roy Moore. The Republican Senate nominee has fashioned an entire career out of subterfuge and self-misrepresentation — as a constitutional authority, as a Baptist and as a spokesman for evangelical values.
Worth reading if only to ensure yourself that Moore was never gave the impression of being a nice, reasonable guy who happened to be a monster in one area — nope.
Jonathan Weisman and why Alabama voters have been getting calls from “Bernie Bernstein.”
Bernie Bernstein pretty much fits the mold of a Jew — at least as the alt-right sees us.
A strange Northeastern accent, somewhere between New York and Boston? Check. Tossing money, but not too much money, around to no good end (remember, we’re rich, but cheap)? Check. Pursuing the agenda of the liberal fake-news media? Check. Riling the worst instincts of the South’s conservative base? Check.
But there was something a little too on the nose, forgive me please, about those robocalls in Alabama from a mythical Washington Post reporter named Bernstein seeking women to dish dirt on Roy Moore, something too “Jewy” to be actually Jewish. And that’s where the rising anti-Semitism of the new white nationalists loses its punch.
I’m not sure that anyone should expect a high degree of subtly from the alt-Reich.
The anti-Semitism of the alt-right, the newest manifestation of bigotry that combines age-old hatred with internet-era technological savvy, biting wit and a self-conscious sense of irony, shows no more logical consistency than the anti-Semitism of the past. Jews are both all-powerful puppetmasters and sniveling weaklings, rapacious capitalists and left-wing anarchists. The Holocaust never happened, but man, was it cool.
In some sense, anti-Semitism has more in common with rising Islamophobia than with endemic racism. It gains its power from the same kind of mythologizing that convinces people like Roy Moore that whole communities in the Midwest are laboring under Shariah law.
One can assume that, for the Roy Moore’s of the world, Judaism was another of those religions of which the Extremely Christian Founding Fathers were completely ignorant.
David Sax joins in the fight against, or at least distrust of, all things digital.
Ten years after the iPhone first swept us off our feet, the growing mistrust of computers in both our personal lives and the greater society we live in is inescapable. This publishing season is flush with books raising alarms about digital technology’s pernicious effects on our lives: what smartphones are doing to our children; how Facebook and Twitter are eroding our democratic institutions; and the economic effects of tech monopolies.
A recent Pew Research Center survey noted that more than 70 percent of Americans were worried about automation’s impact on jobs, while just 21 percent of respondents to a Quartz survey said they trust Facebook with their personal information. Nearly half of millennials worry about the negative effects of social media on their mental and physical health, according to the American Psychiatric Association.
There are very good reasons to worry about the effect of automation on our jobs. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that I look on everyone who says “automation won’t disrupt the job market” with the same kind of disdain and suspicion I used to reserve for doctors who waved off concerns about smoking.
Rachel Snyder connects the dots from domestic abuse to mass murder.
In 2012, while stationed at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Devin Patrick Kelley assaulted his wife and stepson. Kelley was subsequently convicted of domestic violence and released early from the Air Force.
One important detail of the attack: In addition to fracturing the child’s skull and hitting and kicking his wife, Kelley strangled her. If the particular severity of his violence had been better understood and recognized in New Mexico, 26 people, including a 17-month-old baby named Noah, might not have been killed in Sutherland Springs, Tex., this month.
What in all this marks Kelley as the kind of guy who would later pick up a gun and murder a literal church load of people? It’s not the detail you might think.
Strangulation inhabits a category all its own in domestic violence as a marker of lethality. A kick, a punch, a slap, a bite — none of these, though terrible, portend homicide like strangulation does. And while the link between mass shooters and domestic violence is increasingly recognized in the public arena, articles and op-eds, strangulation as a specific sign of lethality in the context of domestic violence remains largely unknown.
Joseph Burgo and the edifying power of shame.
Shame has increasingly come to be viewed as a repressive force whose shackles must be thrown off. Every day it seems someone is proclaiming that he or she has no reason to feel ashamed of one thing or another — being gay or transgender or overweight; having had an abortion; having survived rape or childhood sexual abuse; or struggling with mental illness or addiction. Best-selling self-help author Brené Brown has devoted many books to helping people resist shame, which, Brown says, “corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”
There’s few quicker ways to cut off any comment than to term it “insert anything here” followed by “shaming.” But when does shame become facing what you’ve done wrong, or regret?
Shame may also serve as a force for good when we direct it at behavior damaging to the social fabric. As recent studies have shown, shame originally evolved as a means of promoting obedience to the rules that helped humans live and survive together; it deterred actions that might harm the individual as well as the tribe. In our modern world, too, a fear of being publicly shamed encourages adherence to the rules and standards that enable us to live together in a civilized way. When we turn shame upon individuals who violate those standards, we press them to desist.
And … yeah. No matter how powerfully deserved, the idea of shame as a weapon still has a tooth-aching tinge of The Crucible attached.
Jim Wallis and one last trip to church this morning.
Many traditions in the history of Christianity have attempted to combat and correct the worship of three things: money, sex and power. Catholic orders have for centuries required “poverty, chastity, and obedience” as disciplines to counter these three idols. Other traditions, especially among Anabaptists in the Reformation, Pentecostals and revival movements down through the years have spoken the language of simplicity in living, integrity in relationships and servanthood in leadership. All of our church renewal traditions have tried to provide authentic and more life-giving alternatives to the worship of money, sex and power — which can be understood and used in healthy ways when they are not given primacy in one’s life.
President Trump is an ultimate and consummate worshiper of money, sex and power. American Christians have not really reckoned with the climate he has created in our country and the spiritual obligation we have to repair it. As a result, the soul of our nation and the integrity of the Christian faith are at risk.
Watching pastors stand up this week to defend Roy Moore and attack teenage girls is possibly the saddest, sickest moment in American church history since … Nope. Honestly, the church in America has a long history of supporting racism, sexism, and violence against the poor. This may be a low point, there there are a lot of them. That doesn’t make it any less sickening.
If the APR seems short, and the weekly “what Trump did” infographic is missing, there’s a simple reason — I feel asleep. I’m adding a few additional columns in the next hour, so look for updates (and also copy-editing).