Do You Believe Women when their Assaulter isn’t a Republican?
If you only believe women, and care about their claims of sexual assault committed by powerful men, when those men are Republicans, then you do not care about sexual assault and you do not believe women.
We all know that Trump is a serial sexual assaulter and a full blown rapist. While none among us personally witnessed him committing these crimes, we were not literally in the room, watching firsthand as he assaulted one woman or another, we believe that it happened. We know that it happened. We’ve heard the dozens of claims against Trump, and we’ve believed the women, we know it’s the truth. We know that Trump is a liar and a scumbag and that, for this and many other reasons, he does not deserve to be president.
We also believed Christine Blasey Ford’s claims against Brett Kavanaugh. She claimed that he assaulted her when they were both teenagers, and we knew that it was true. We listened to her. We knew she was telling the truth. We knew that Kavanaugh was lying. We know that Kavanaugh is a liar and a scumbag and that he does not deserve to be a Supreme Court Justice.
When I say we I mean those of, or purporting to be of, the Left. Whether you call yourself a Democrat, a liberal, a progressive, a socialist, a feminist (quite different categories and terms and kinds of people, but often thrown in together when discussing the “Left”), you very likely, all but certainly, opposed Trump and Kavanaugh on principle, and also on the merits of the sexual assault claims made against them. You believed Ford, and Trump’s many accusers. If that’s the case, but you don’t believe Tara Reade, or aren’t even willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and support an investigation into her claim against Biden, then you are a hypocrite, you cannot claim that you believe women, you cannot claim to take sexual assault seriously, you cannot claim to be a feminist, and you hardly have a leg to stand on in justifying your support of Biden and in opposition to Reade in claiming that the Right/Republicans is/are worse.
Republicans and all those of the Right are absolutely horrible. They are truly some of the worst people in the world, in history, for myriad reasons. Those of us on the Left rightly call out the Right’s bullshit, their evil, their lies and hypocrisies. When they pretend to be the party of “values,” claiming to care about family, law, morality, decency, respectability, all that horseshit, but support people and actions directly counter to their claims and purported philosophies, they deserve to be called out and trashed. When they defend men like Trump and Kavanaugh, and attack and ridicule, and prompt death threats against, the women who spoke their truths about what those scumbag men did to them, they deserve our scorn and opposition and worse. “They” are exactly what “we” should not be. Powerful men, regardless of which party they’re a member, shouldn’t get a pass for their offenses.
It’s not as though the “Left” never turns on their own. There have been instances where sexual assault claims have been made against Democrats and taken much more seriously by the party and the media than is this case of Tara Reade’s claim against Biden. Al Franken had the combined forces of the media, his own party, and of course Right wing hypocrites, calling for his ouster from the Senate. Franken was accused of inappropriate touching and kissing. I won’t defend Franken’s behavior, but will say that the claims against him were much less serious, and that he was a much better person, politician, and advocate for progressive policies than Biden is or has ever been.
It’s embarrassing how many women in the Democratic party have come out and spoken in favor of Biden, essentially saying that they believe him and not Reade. From complete sellouts and frauds like Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris to once-promising women like Stacy Abrams, the shameless and hypocritical defense of Biden shows that truth and honor and feminism and social justice don’t really matter to party loyalists. It cheapens their opposition to Republican offenders, showing their outspoken offense to have more to do with political expediency than justice.
The same absolutely goes for voters, regular people. If you supported the women who spoke out against men like Trump and Kavanaugh, but not the woman who’s spoken out against Biden, you need to examine why one matters to you and the other doesn’t. If the biggest difference between them is that you just think one man is more likeable than another, or that one has a D next to their name and the other an R, you have to examine your priorities and what really matters to you.