Thanks.
What's so jarring is it feels like only yesterday that even the sniff of something like this would derail a political career.
Although as I type that I think 'Bill Clinton'. But then he's never run for office since his scandal...
.
If this is a cultural watershed, let’s go back to where it all started.
Adam and Eve ?
Adam and Eve ?
The adult "toy" and "movie"store?
What do fairly tales have to do with anything?Adam and Eve ?
So sexual harassment is a good and natural expression of heterosexuality?
Yeah, the woman component of heterosexuality doesn't agree....
The Republicans should be rebranded The Party of Roy Moore. In every ad in 2018.
There was one notable absence in his speech: Franken did not apologize. In fact, he made it clear that he disagreed with his accusers. “Some of the allegations against me are simply not true,” he said. “Others I remember very differently.” Earlier, Franken had in fact apologized to his accusers, and he didn’t take his apologies back now, but he made it plain that they had been issued in the hopes of facilitating a conversation and an investigation that would clear him. He had, it seems, been attempting to buy calm time to work while a Senate ethics committee looked into the accusations. But, by Thursday morning, thirty-two Democratic senators had called on Franken to resign. The force of the #MeToo moment leaves no room for due process, or, indeed, for Franken’s own constituents to consider their choice.
Still, the force works selectively. “I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party,” said Franken, referring to Donald Trump and the Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. Trump and Moore are immune because the blunt irresistible force works only on the other half of the country.
That half is cleaning its ranks in the face of—and in clear reaction to—genuine moral depravity on the other side. The Trump era is one of deep and open immorality in politics. Moore is merely one example. Consider Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican who won his congressional race earlier this year after not only being captured on tape shoving a newspaper reporter but then also lying to police about it. Consider the tax bill, which is stitched together from shameless greed and boldface lies. Consider the series of racist travel bans. Consider the withdrawal from a series of international agreements aimed at bettering the future of humanity, from migration to climate change to cultural preservation. These are men who proclaim their allegiance to the Christian faith while acting in openly hateful, duplicitous, and plainly murderous ways. In response to this unbearable spectacle, the roughly half of Americans who are actually deeply invested in thinking of themselves as good people are trying to claim a moral high ground. The urge to do so by policing sex is not surprising. As Susan Sontag pointed out more than half a century ago, Christianity has “concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue” and, consequently, “everything pertaining to sex has been a ‘special case’ in our culture.”
The case of Franken makes it all that much more clear that this conversation is, in fact, about sex, not about power, violence, or illegal acts. The accusations against him, which involve groping and forcible kissing, arguably fall into the emergent, undefined, and most likely undefinable category of “sexual misconduct.” Put more simply, Franken stands accused of acting repeatedly like a jerk, and he denies that he acted this way. The entire sequence of events, from the initial accusations to Franken’s resignation, is based on the premise that Americans, as a society, or at least half of a society, should be policing non-criminal behavior related to sex.
While this half (roughly) of American society is morally superior and also just bigger than the other half (roughly), it is not the half that holds power in either of the houses of Congress or in the majority of the state houses, and not the half that is handing out lifetime appointments to federal courts at record-setting speed. And while the two halves of this divided country may disagree on the limits of acceptable sexual behavior, they increasingly agree on the underlying premise that sexual behavior must be policed. As I wrote in an earlier column, drawing on the work of the pioneering feminist scholar Gayle Rubin, we seem to be in a period of renegotiating sexual norms. Rubin has warned that such renegotiations tend to produce ever more restrictive regimes of closely regulating sexuality. While policing such unpleasant behavior as groping or wet kisses landed on an unwilling recipient may seem to fall outside the realm of sexuality, it is precisely this behavior’s relationship to sex that makes it a “special case”—and lands us in the trap of policing sexuality.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-...-resignation-and-the-selective-force-of-metoo
I think we have enough "due process" in Franken's case
The case of Franken makes it all that much more clear that this conversation is, in fact, about sex, not about power, violence, or illegal acts. The accusations against him, which involve groping and forcible kissing, arguably fall into the emergent, undefined, and most likely undefinable category of “sexual misconduct.” Put more simply, Franken stands accused of acting repeatedly like a jerk, and he denies that he acted this way. The entire sequence of events, from the initial accusations to Franken’s resignation, is based on the premise that Americans, as a society, or at least half of a society, should be policing non-criminal behavior related to sex.
Guess i don’t quite feel the rage from that photo.
Wasn’t a smart move on his part but unless i missed it he didn’t touch her right ?
I kinda tried to make these points a few weeks back in this thread. Not to take away from the victims, but to caution against lynch mob mentality. And I suggested sex is treated with a special extra sensitive barometer.Yeah. Part of what's causing all these cases to be lumped together is that the lay definitions for what's occurring are so vague ..."sexual assault" is everything from pinching someone's ass to holding them down and penetrating them. "Unwanted sexual advance" ranges from leaning over to kiss someone on a first date who might not be interested yet to repeatedly trying to kiss or proposition a co-worker. It's absurd.
Whatever you think of what Franken did, it's not in the same league as what people like Moore, Conyers and Weinstein did (or are accused of doing). If the punishment for every case, however mild or serious, is going to be the death penalty (rhetorically speaking), the backlash is going to be swift, and that isn't going to do anyone any good.
??????
He's touching her in the photo.
And clearly he's a boob man
unlike George HW "David Cop a Feel" Bush who is an ass man.
The issue with the Franken story is that the accusers story that he made some last minute script changed to pressure her into letting him kiss her has been disproven by video from years earlier, where Franken did the exact same show with the exact same scene. Combine that with the accuser being a common guest on Hannity, combined with Roger Stone apparently knowing that Franken was going to have a problem prior to anyone else, and it makes people a tad suspicious.I can't tell if he's actually touching her in the photo or not. I do think it's important if he is touching her versus if he's not.
But the photo was a supporting evidence, not an initial claim. So, it doesn't matter if he's touching her or no, because the photo isn't the main claim.
If it was just the photo I would be with BEAL here in saying that I'm not too put out of place by it. It does genuinely look to me that he's hovering over her or maybe ever so slightly touching her with obviously humorous intentions about it. Pervy and raunchy, perhaps, but not coerced kissing tongue down your thrown I'm famous let me use my power to descend upon you kind of harassment.
But we - the collective we - have spent centuries working on and crafting the legal system. Innocent till proven guilty. A jury of your peers. Etc etc.
I think he's right to step down. If he's innocent, he can do more to continue to fight the accusations, clear his name, and come back even stronger. If he isn't, then fuck him.
I see this a lot - people conflating the criminal justice system with the court of public opinion.
"Beyond a reasonable doubt" has NEVER been a standard when it comes to the public deciding that a person is unsavoury. I am not sure why now it is different, except the underlying feeling that it's "unfair" that these men lost their jobs.