I have to write this quickly because any minute now, Senate candidate Roy Moore might quit or be cleared or might simply be blown out of the headlines by some fresh violent atrocity that the media will either attempt to exploit in an effort to destroy our second amendment or attempt to distort so we don’t notice that every killer involved happened to be named Mohammed. At my back, I always hear the news cycle’s winged chariot drawing near.
I’m in a hotel in New York, and this morning over my covfefe in the lounge, I looked up at a television and saw a Chyron announcing that someone I’d never heard of was finally going to “break her silence.” And I thought, “Oh, please don’t.” Silence has become a precious commodity and we need as much of it as we can get. Otherwise, it’s all noise and outrage and outrage at the noise and noise about the outrage. As far as I’m concerned, you should only break your silence in case of emergency.
But so far, my words have gone unheeded. And now controversial and kind-of-hilarious Senate candidate Roy Moore has been accused of sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl back in 1979 when he was 32. He’s said to have carried on with a couple of other young-but-legal girls as well. The contact with the child wasn’t forced but, of course, she was too young to consent to it and he was old enough to be responsible, so it’s bad.
I can only see one rational moral response to this: If it’s true, he should step down; if it’s a political frame-up, he should fight it.
What bothers me about the story is I have absolutely no idea which is the case. No clue. Even before the allegations were made, I had been thinking about how easy it would be to set someone up in the current climate. Get a few women together. Say something happened too long ago to check. No one reads past the headline, and everyone’s done something at some point they shouldn’t have, so it’s a slam dunk smear.
In this particular case, too, everyone in establishment politics hates Moore. (I mean, he is kind of a loony-tune, but if that disqualified you to work in the capitol, the place would be empty.) So no one will come running to his defense.
Or… maybe he’s just guilty. I really don’t know.
I blame feminists and the media for this cloud of confusion, mostly because I hate feminists and the media, but also because they do bear some of the blame. For instance, the New York Times, a former newspaper, now has a tip line where you can complain about something sexual someone famous did to you back in the day. How is that not going to lead to abuse? Liars will flock to it. And if someone calls up and complains about Barack Obama, and someone else calls up and complains about Rush Limbaugh — which one do you think the Times will follow up on? Me too.
And then Toxic Feminists (a redundancy, I know) with their snarling hatred of men and masculinity start shrieking about how it’s an outrage that any male should be considered innocent until proven guilty or that any one event should be judged less egregious than any other. With that kind of attitude, things can get very Salem-y very fast
USA Today has a running list of Hollywood sexual offenders and I was reading through it and came upon the charges against Dustin Hoffman. The now 80-year-old Hoffman is accused of talking dirty to one woman and inviting another woman on a date some 30-odd years ago. And you know what? I don’t care. Not even a little. I think Harvey Weinstein, assuming he’s guilty, should go to prison for what he did and I think what Hoffman allegedly did shouldn’t even be mentioned in the papers. When they’re both on the same list, the whole list becomes a moral blur.
Human life is complicated. Sexuality is one of the most complicated parts of human life. Some people make errors, other people corner you in the basement and bang off in front of you, and still other people tell lies. If any voice can be raised against any man and illicit the same level of outrage, all voices will eventually blend into a silence of obscurity and indifference — and that’s a kind of silence that’s very difficult to break.
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