Complicity In The Boys Club Is Entrenched | Consider Joe Biden In The Supreme Court Confirmation Of Clarence Thomas
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Writing for New York Magazine's The Cut this week, Rebecca Traister raised a delicate issue, one that simmers in the minds of many Democratic women. Traister questions just how many times we must go through these grand national revelations of male misbehavior. Last year it was Trump talking about grabbing women by the pussies whenever he wanted. It's a right, Trump explained, of powerful men. And then America elected the pussy grabber president -- because he promised to give America to the small group of Christians demanding a theocracy for America. Yes. To add insult to injury, America's most supposedly devout Christians made the pussy grabber president of America.
Trump is not an isolated incident; nor is Harvey Weinstein, writes Traister. These are not unique stories of sexual harassment or sexual assault. We must come to grips with a "nuts and bolts infrastructure of gender injustice that has permitted generations -- centuries -- of this behavior, and that has worked again and again to beat back any resistance to it."
Former senator and vice president Joe Biden was the architect of the Violence Against Women Act and most recently a voice in the movement to address campus sexual assault. While many of us respect Joe Biden for all the good he has done for Americans, we also view Biden as deeply complicit in his role of "protecting the powerful" while allowing the shaming of Anita Hill for speaking truth to power. Biden silenced other witnesses who wanted to corroborate Anita Hill's allegations against Clarence Thomas in his supreme court nomination hearing. In fact, then-senator Joe Biden, who led the all-white, all-male Judiciary Committee in 1991 initially ignored Anita Hill and her desire to testify against Thomas as being fit for a position on the US Supreme Court. Traister writes:
