I’m going to wade into the weeds here in a separate blog rather than sully another one.
If you read the original Washington Post story, you know it was rigorously reported, with great care and professionalism. Four women who did not seek out the press, who did not know each other, and who surely guessed going public would bring them nothing but grief, came forward and provided first-person details that established a pattern. Thirty people corroborated details. This is not attack journalism. It is great journalism.
If Roy Moore had a long and demonstrated history of randomly attacking children with a baseball bat, or if the FBI announced it had found in his possession a stash of child porn, Moore supporters would never back him. But that, in a way, figuratively, is what he stands accused of doing. His “porn,” his addiction, was cruising malls for young women, often teenagers. His “attacking children” was moving sexually on those young women and leaving them damaged.
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Who were the girls he targeted? Interestingly, this tribune of the common folk and their earnest, believing ways allegedly preyed mostly on the unprotected. He chose young women he could push around …
A thing about predators, from the men of the Catholic Church sex scandals to the man cruising the mall, is that they never prey on the protected. They don’t prey on the daughter of the biggest family in town, the child of the man who owns the factory or the local newspaper. They tend to prey on kids with no father in the home.
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Roy Moore targeted the deplorables. They were people with no sway, no pull. Some of them, in the presidential election, voted for Donald Trump.
There are better conservatives in Alabama than Roy Moore. Republican women, rise up and raise hell. That would be real loyalty, and to those who are really your own.
(Peggy Noonan, Alabama Women. Say No to Moore)
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Power without character looks like [several examples omitted] … And it looks like the Christian defense of Moore, which has ceased to be recognizably Christian.
This may be the greatest shame of a shameful time. What institution, of all institutions, should be providing the leaven of principle to political life? What institution is specifically called on to oppose the oppression of children, women and minorities, to engage the world with civility and kindness, to prepare its members for honorable service to the common good?
A hint: It is the institution that is currently — in some visible expressions — overlooking, for political reasons, credible accusations of child molestation. Some religious leaders are willing to call good evil, and evil good, in service to a different faith — a faith defined by their political identity. This is heresy at best; idolatry at worst.
Most Christians, of course, are not actively supporting Moore. But how many Americans would identify evangelical Christianity as a prophetic voice for human dignity and moral character on the political right? Very few. And they would be wrong.
Many of the people who should be supplying the moral values required by self-government have corrupted themselves. The Trump administration will be remembered for many things. The widespread, infectious corruption of institutions and individuals may be its most damning legacy.
(Michael Gerson)
Apart from some vagueness about just who the defendant is, I’m on board with Gerson’s indictment.
Silver lining: this marks the moment that the defendant “evangelical Christianity” [in North America] has irrevocably forfeited the right to kvetch about compromises some Orthodox Clergy in Russia made to preserve the Church through the reign of Communism.
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The religious right’s embrace of Trump … is not some kind of aberration in the transformation of a faith into a worldly and political cause, it is its logical consequence. The Christian right’s support for a sociopathic, cruel, and vulgar pagan was inevitable, in other words, from the moment the Moral Majority was born. If politics is fused with religion, and if your opponents are deemed evil, then almost anything can be justified to defeat them. Sooner or later, you’l find yourself defending the molestation of a minor. Which is why I have long refused to call this political movement Christian, but Christianist. It is not about faith; it is about power.
But evangelical Republicans are not, of course, the only group susceptible to such corruption. Democrats are human as well, as we have so abundantly discovered. Many of them have also made their political struggle into a secular form of religion, and found myriad ways to defend the indefensible because the cause demanded it. I vividly remember Gloria Steinem’s op-ed defending Bill Clinton’s sex abuse at the time (she still refuses to disown it). I remember how many wanted to conflate sexual abuse with private consensual sex. I also recall a bizarre very-Washington lunch in that period when, for some reason, I was seated next to Barbra Streisand (my first and thankfully last encounter with the singer). I mentioned Paula Jones’s lawsuit — which I’d just defended in the pages of The New Republic — just to see what she’d say. Streisand’s lip curled. “Ugh,” she scoffed. “She’s a little kurva.” I later discovered that this means “whore,” “bitch,” or “slut.” And that was by no means an unusual Democratic response of the time.
(Andrew Sullivan, The Danger of Knowing You’re on the ‘Right Side of History’)
Have we at last reached the end of whataboutism?
Sullivan then turns to admiring “Michelle Goldberg’s beginning of a reckoning with the toxic legacy of the Clintons.” Having dropped the New York Times a month or two ago, I have not used any of my free articles on Goldberg’s piece. I’m cynical about people “discovering” the evil of people who have passed from any real power.
I will not judge Goldberg—or Caitlyn Flanagan, or Chelsea Handler, or the rest of the growing throng—guilty of opportunism, though, because life’s too messy for that. Maybe Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and especially Roy Moore (who, like Bill Clinton, preyed on low-status women who could be dismissed as “little kurva”) actually opened their eyes.
If so, may their epiphany spread even further, multiply, and bear greater fruit than just a belated condemnation of the country’s most powerful power couple.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 