Right On: Bill Clinton, Gloria Steinem and hypocritical feminist leaders

November 29, 2017 Utah Channel 3

OPINION — By excusing Bill Clinton’s sexual predations, hypocritical feminist leaders gave cover to powerful men, facilitating their abuse of subordinate women for the last 25 years.

In 1991, Anita Hill’s claims that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her awakened the nation to the power imbalance between male managers and female employees. Hill’s claims were followed by an avalanche of women of all political and social backgrounds making similar claims.

Then Bubba Clinton came along.

Clinton’s nomination in 1992 put feminist leaders on the horns of a dilemma. Clinton supported a potpourri of feminist causes that Republican George Bush had vetoed. But Bubba came with sexual predator baggage.

Paula Jones, a state employee working for then Governor Clinton, was brought to his hotel room by state troopers and humiliated. Juanita Broaddrick, an Arkansas campaign worker, claimed she was lured to his hotel room in 1978, bloodied and raped. Gennifer Flowers claimed she’d had a 12-year relationship with Clinton. After his election as president, Kathleen Willey was abused in the Oval Office.

Then came Monica Lewinsky, the blue dress, and “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

These women had far more credible evidence than most of today’s accusers. But Clinton was rescued by an unlikely group: the feminist political machine.

By the 1990s, the feminist movement had devolved into an identity-politics wing of the Democratic Party. Women listened to rousing Democratic calls for their empowerment while leading feminists chose to throw Clinton’s victims under the bus.

Gloria Steinem, godmother of the feminist movement, wrote a now notorious editorial in the New York Times at the height of the Clinton scandal. Titled “Feminists and the Clinton Question,” the opinion piece epitomized hypocrisy. She wrote:

Even if the allegations are true, the President is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is accused of having made a gross, dumb, and reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life. She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. In other words, President Clinton took ‘no’ for an answer.

Last month, Caitlin Flanagan, an award-winning contributing editor of the liberal Atlantic Monthly, described the effect of Steinem’s op-ed: “(It) slut-shamed, victim-blamed, and age-shamed; it urged compassion for and gratitude to the man the women accused. Moreover, Steinem characterized contemporary feminism as a weaponized auxiliary of the Democratic Party.”

Flanagan goes on, “Feminists saved the 42nd president of the United States in the 1990s. They were on the wrong side of history; is it finally time to make things right?”

Belatedly, feminists are coming to recognize how defending Clinton empowered men who sexually harass women.

U.S News & World Report columnist John Leo captured the mood they had created. He wrote that rather than condemning Clinton, the scandal was “probably the decade’s high-water mark of euphoria around the water cooler … a chance to break free from the office sex police.”

Marjorie Williams deserves credit for her 1998 Vanity Fair article titled “Clinton and Women.” She points out that Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer and Carol Moseley-Braun along with Rep. Nancy Pelosi all hemmed and hawed about Bubba’s Lewinsky affair. None denounced a predator-president of their own party.

Williams lists a variety of feminist writers and advocates who equivocated at the time: feminist author Betty Friedan; Kathy Rodgers of the National Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund; Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation; Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, chairwoman of the Women’s Campaign Fund; feminist author Erica Jong. Her list goes on.

Lewinsky’s age at the time, 22, presented another quandary for feminists who had argued for years against parental-consent laws for teenagers seeking abortions. They found themselves acknowledging that many women in their early 20s lack emotional maturity.

Now comes Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore, today’s poster child for sexual harassment. Moore is accused of cruising malls seeking underage girls 40 years ago. He denies it.

I’m with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who said of Moore, “I believe the women.”

Contrast McConnell with Nancy Pelosi, once again dancing around serious allegations against a member of her own party.

Democratic Congressman John Conyers paid $27,000 to settle a harassment suit in 2015. Now four former staffers have signed affidavits accusing him of being a serial sexual harasser, evidence far more concrete than exists against Moore.

Yet when interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Pelosi refused to say that she believes the women or whether Conyers should resign. Instead Pelosi pilloried President Trump and others for defending Moore in exactly the way she defended Clinton and now defends Conyers.

With the Clintons conveniently fading from the political scene, some feminist leaders are belatedly acknowledging that they facilitated sexual harassment and abuse for the last 25 years. Victims over these years, their lives permanently changed, are likely to take little comfort in any long-forgotten political victories won in 1993.

Feminist leaders likewise must take the blame for preventing sexual abuse from disqualifying a candidate for public office. The country elected both Clinton and Trump despite their well-known maltreatment of women.

I do not condone any form of sexual harassment by any man, Bill Clinton or Donald Trump, John Conyers, Al Franken or Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby.

Sexual harassment should not be a partisan issue. All too many men from both parties are guilty and deserve their fall from grace if not prosecution. But blatant feminist hypocrisy during the Clinton era delayed justice 25 years for victims of sexual abuse.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Howard Sierer is an opinion columnist for St. George News. The opinions stated in this article are his own and may not be representative of St. George News.

Email: hsierer@stgeorgeutah.com

Twitter: @STGnews