Coming to defense of Sen. Daylin Leach

Daylin Leach and I agree on virtually nothing. He is a very progressive Democrat. I am a very traditional Republican, who was what you could call a “regressive Democrat” for the first 37 years of my political life. I am fervently pro-life. He is passionately pro-choice, and believes that a woman’s right to choose an abortion is sacrosanct.

But if you believe in fairness, and if you strongly support the principle that someone is innocent until proven guilty, you need to listen to what I have to say about the senator.

Last year, at the height of the #Metoo movement, Leach was accused of acting inappropriately with some female staff members. The allegations were vague, unsubstantiated and something along the lines of “he told off color jokes” and “he invaded personal space,” which is a less sinister way of saying someone touched you on the shoulder and you didn’t like it. Leach defended himself vigorously and a bit too forcefully.

At the time, I thought that he did exactly the right thing in not caving to what has quickly become a sexual and gender witch hunt. That didn’t make me very many friends on the left, which is giddy with intoxication at the prospect of bringing down the supposed patriarchy. Boom, down comes Harvey Weinstein. Boom, down comes Kevin Spacey. Boom, down comes Louis CK. Boom, down comes Bill Cosby. Boom, down comes Al Franken. Boom, down comes George H.W. Bush. Boom, down comes any other number of public figures accused of getting on the wrong side of the gender divide.

The problem is that each case was different, and the conduct that was being challenged varied greatly among the alleged perpetrators. Clearly, this was not a one size fits all movement.

But that’s what happened to Leach. Lack of nuance and sophistication on the part of women and men who are expert at exploiting a movement that looks a lot more like vengeance than justice has caused simple, frat boy behavior to be equated with and treated the same way as actual criminal activity.

Unfortunately, politics being what they are, people on the right who justifiably decry the #Metoo movement’s excesses were virtually silent when men on the left became its targets. Many in the GOP who thought the movement had gotten out of hand were thrilled when Al Franken became road kill on the “female empowerment” highway. Locally, the same thing happened to Leach.

I know that I have to inject something here about the legitimacy of the “intentions” of #Metoo. As an immigration attorney who has worked with battered and abused women, and as someone who has known victims in her own life and among her friends and relatives, I am very much aware that there needed to be a change in societal attitudes. We needed to stop reflexively disbelieving women who said they’d been abused.

But going to the opposite extreme is equally wrong, and leads to injustices like the one that just happened this past week. Katie Muth is a Democratic challenger for the seat held by John Rafferty in the Pennsylvania suburbs. Muth was slated to appear at a forum sponsored by high school students, alongside of other candidates including Leach. But when she found out that Leach was going to be on the same stage, she complained to the organizers because, as a self-professed rape victim, she felt uncomfortable appearing in the same airspace as the senator.

And so, Leach was uninvited, causing him to complain about it to Joe Foster, Montgomery County Democratic Chair, referring to Muth as “a toxic hand grenade” and “a dreadful person.”

Perhaps those were not the most delicate words he could have used. And it would have been perfectly fine if Muth called Leach out for acting like a bull in a china shop, or some other such description that acknowledges that politics can be rough and tumble.

But she chose to make this all about the #Metoo movement, as did some of the media that chronicled the dispute.

I am not sympathetic to Daylin Leach’s politics. But I am sympathetic to the dilemma men (and even some women) are faced with these days when they run counter to the movement that was created to help victims find their voices, and has instead given them a bullhorn to become, in their own way, victimizers.

It’s wrong. Enough.