Judge Roy Moore runs into a cultural shift

A version of this was published in the Sky Hi News Nov. 29, 2017 https://www.skyhinews.com/news/muftic-judge-roy-moore-runs-into-a-cultural-shift/

Updated 12/6/2017: Time Magazine named the cultural shift Time's Person of the Year
http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2017-silence-breakers/

The  firestorm over the candidacy of Judge Roy Moore is not the beginning of a heap full of a cultural shift in the US but a catharsis and a result.  On December 12, as Alabama voters go to the polls.  Alabama  is a battleground  among three  currents of thought: those who put moral and fairness values above political concerns; those who  who believe the accusations,  but put political concerns above moral outrage, and those who hear, see or ,speak no evil and thereby  can avoid making the choice between a clean conscience and and achieving  political goals. However the December vote plays out, the GOP  in the US  loses. They lose either a seat in the Senate or they are burdened with  reputation of a party that does not care enough about the personal qualities of their candidates.

Why the shift? What is different now than earlier is that more women are working side by side with men. Plaintiff attorneys have demonstrated a successful technique to find multiple women  victims willing to speak out so  they could  show a pattern of behavior, which makes each accuser  more credible. I date the technique resulting in women being believed instead of being treated as liars and publicity seekers to the Bill Cosby trial.  What has not changed is that the workplace is mostly still male who are in the position of power over women’s career advancement and who have gotten away with taking advantage of women far too long and who missed the signals of changing attitudes. The cultural shift is still a work in progress. In 2016, moral outrage lost out to political expediency when Donald Trump won in spite of the credibility  of multiple  witnesses to  many of his penchant to grab women  and his boasting of his conduct recorded on the Access Hollywood tapes. “Deny, deny” worked well enough  for him and showed the way  for Roy Moore to defend himself.

All cases of  accusations of  unwelcomed male sexual conduct toward women are not alike. Where the  Roy Moore issue  differs from the accused behavior of Donald Trump and Al Franken  or past president’s infidelities is that Moore preyed on children who  were were not considered old enough to make decisions about their sexual choices. He is an accused pedophile. However, the issue has opened the floodgates to ensnare actors, celebrities, politicians, and intellectual icons whose alleged or proven victims were women of legal age.  

While politics and policies are an integral part of the storm, the issue of sexual victimism of women and girls is non partisan.  Bad male behavior toward women used to be mildly  tolerated and expected by women who were beginning to work in jobs once solely occupied by men. Sometimes public exposure  of sexual misdeeds was used  and excused as political weapons  against political adversaries , or it was swept under the guise of locker room talk, while those who came forth were  publicly shamed.  Even in my memory, the sexual escapades of FDR, JFK,  and Bill Clinton  were either ignored by the good ole boy press at the time, passed off as “he said, she said,” or revealed later by historians and investigative  journalists.  Many of the accused now of past  misdeeds will only stand trial in the court of public opinion or the ballot box or Senate ethics processes because the statute of limitations ran out.  The only president to pay the price while in office was  Bill  Clinton who was nearly  impeached.

Some have called it a Faustian bargain to believe the accusations, but to in spite of that think it is more important to ignore them if it advances a political goal.

Why Faust? The greatest work in German literature, Faust,  was authored  in the late 1700’sby  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  He tackled a basic human dilemma,  a conflicted man making a choice between being moral or losing  out on other personal goals.  In Goethe’s plan,  Faust   makes an arrangement with the devil: the devil will do everything that Faust wants while he is here on Earth, and in exchange Faust will serve the devil in Hell.   That whether Roy Moore is a devil and those who believe he committed those acts, yet support him because his vote in needed in the Senate for other conservative issues is an over the top analogy is debatable. But it does illustrate a common  human dilemma. In most of the accused of sexual predatory behavior  involved of age women or  who were compromised by slipping them a mickey (Bill Cosby). Where the Moore issue is even more extreme and differs from the behavior of Donald Trump and Al Franken is that Moore is an accused pedophile who preyed on children.  But, as Kellyanne Ann Conway, often spokesperson for Donald Trump, said on cable news, the decision is up to the people of Alabama, but his vote is needed to pass tax reform. The Alabama  chair of the GOP gave the same kind of rationalization in the party’s continued support of Moore.  Faust’s bargain lives on.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/20/politics/kellyanne-conway-roy-moore-fox-interview/index.html

http://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/24/one-nation-under-perverts-its-time-for-women-to-take-a-knee/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/womans-effort-to-infiltrate-the-washington-post-dates-back-months/2017/11/29/ce95e01a-d51e-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html?tidr=notifi_push_breaking-news&pushid=5a1f7d5aedb3621d00000062