Sexual predators: the problem haunting American politics

“I have lived my whole life with a Republican Party with which I disagreed,” said Charles M. Blow in The New York Times, but at least I used to understand it. It was the party of the “moral” majority, of God-fearing folk. But lately, it seems to have abandoned any pretence of piety or moral authority. It voted for Donald Trump, an adulterer and “pathological liar” who is a “walking, talking rebuke of everything the Christian Right had ever told me that it stood for”. And now some Republicans are even supporting the hard-right former judge Roy Moore in his effort to win a Senate seat in Alabama, despite the fact that Moore has been accused by multiple women of having inappropriate sexual contact with them when they were still minors and he was in his 30s, working as an assistant district attorney. Moore was reportedly even banned from a local mall for bothering teenage girls.

The GOP leadership has mostly disowned Moore, said Jonah Goldberg in National Review, but a depressing number of conservative public figures have sought to excuse his alleged behaviour. Jim Zeigler, the state auditor of Alabama, pointed to the Bible to defend Moore over claims that he molested a 14-year-old girl, saying “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter”. Others argued that we should relax because it all happened a long time ago – and, besides, the Democrats have done worse. This attitude is shocking. At least Moore, who insists the claims are baseless, acknowledges that the allegations are serious. Alas, this is what happens when parties forget their principles and think only of “winning”.

Democrats are just as susceptible to this sort of blinkered partisanship, said Matthew Yglesias on Vox.com. Recall all the excuses we made for Bill Clinton. We dismissed the Lewinsky affair as just an ugly piece of Republican scandal-mongering. It was a private marital issue for the Clintons, we argued; Bill may have behaved badly, but his misdemeanours were trivial when set against the important job he was doing. Looking back through today’s lens, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein affair, it’s clear that that argument was badly “miscast”. The Lewinsky scandal wasn’t about infidelity or perjury. It was about a man abusing his authority over a younger female subordinate. Clinton should have resigned. America is currently having a moment of reckoning for sexual predators. But as the scandal grows, we should acknowledge that we had a chance to do this almost 20 years ago. “And we blew it.”