OK, well, that's not what this is about. I mean it is, sort of, except it's not an instruction manuals for candidates who have had unsavory accusations leveled at them a month before an election.
We are, of course, talking about the allegations against Judge Roy Moore, who is running for the Senate seat in Alabama vacated by Jeff Sessions when he became Attorney General. The allegations consist of suggestions that he made advances toward a girl then 14, and that he asked out a couple girls who were then at least as young as 18, and maybe one was 17, when he was about 32. Today we have yet another one, and it's getting pretty hard to want to support the guy.
It is easy as heck to lump everything together as one case. But it is really not. The issues regarding the girls who were 18 (one of them thinks she might have been 17; it was 40 years ago and hard to be accurate) are very different -- he is supposed to have asked them out, and there is no apparent physical action at all, just that he asked them out and they each declined. Had he been 24 it would not even have been an issue at all, because nothing happened.
I was never what we would call a "player." Forty years ago, before starting to go out with the young lady who is now my wife, I dated (in my 20s), of course. As I was an actor and opera singer at the time, I was not unpopular among the ladies, if only because I was (and am) straight. And I very much recall being at least 26, 27 or so and dating at one point a young lady of 19 and another of 20. The age difference was certainly not something I thought to be odd, nor was it ever said to me by them or anyone else that there was something unsavory.
So for a 32-year-old Roy Moore to have asked out a couple girls who were about 18 simply doesn't strike me as any issue, especially since they declined and nothing ever happened. On their own, I don't see those as being even noteworthy. In fact, I'd like to ask that question of ultraliberal Rob Reiner, who long ago played a teacher with an attraction to a school student on an episode the TV show "Headmaster" that was portrayed as somehow OK, as long as he waited until she graduated to go out with him.
The point there is that, had those been the only accusations, there would have been nothing at all there and we would not have been talking. It is OK, I guess, for a 32-year-old to ask out an 18-year-old, and OK for them to say "no, thanks." I wouldn't necessarily want my (fictional) daughter at 18 to go out with a 32-year-old either, but it would not be scandalous.
And that's kind of why the whole Moore thing doesn't seem quite what it is intended, or at least it wasn't until the more serious allegation yesterday came up. You see, the one thing raised before today, that would be a concern, is the issue with the 14-year-old, who now, 40 years later, is saying that she was fondled by Moore back then, and he aggressively denies it, threatening now to sue the Washington Post, that paragon of journalism, for reporting the story.
If it actually happened -- and let's make sure that we say this here -- Moore should not be running for the Senate. Given yesterday's accusation, he probably shouldn't anyway, but let's take a step two days back, with what we were presented with at that point.
First, if it did happen, he also should not have been a judge, let alone Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. In the 40 years since, it would seem logical that the accuser herself might have raised the issue at least once, perhaps when he was pursuing the bench position, or perhaps when he was a primary candidate for the Senate seat he is currently going after. It is a good year for the receptivity of the public to such accusations, but it has been reasonable to do so since, well, Bill Clinton was running for president.
Why might someone wait until a month before a Senate election to bring this out? Gee, I don't know. And why also were a couple stories about him asking out two 18-year-olds when he was 32 not relevant before? Well, I can answer that. It's because they weren't relevant then and aren't now either -- they were simply lumped in by the reporter to provide artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise unsubstantiated accusation, in the hopes of trying to present a pattern that would make the 14-year-old's story 40 years later seem more credible.
While with yesterday's additional accusation, this all should soon be moot, why am I willing to consider that the story about the 14-year-old might not be what it appears? Well, I can think of three or four reasons off the top of my head.
(1) It is the Post, which comes replete with a bias against any conservative, and whose motives can never be trusted. These are the same people who just printed and tweeted out one single frame of a video showing President Trump with a set of foreign leaders at the ASEAN conference this week, apparently grimacing during an odd group handshake, although the entire rest of the video shows him smilingly socializing during that episode.
(2) The UVa incident, where an entire fraternity chapter was made out to look like rapists when a student named Jackie Coakley made up a gang-rape story, and Rolling Stone magazine, with journalistic integrity rivaling the Post, ran with it. Ever since, we have unfortunately had to treat accusations of rape with a grain of salt, since we now know that such incidents may be fictional.
(3) The lumping in of the asking-an-18-year-old-on-a-date incident, which otherwise would have been of no interest whatever. If the 14-year-old's story could stand on its own and be substantiated, the "reporter" wouldn't have needed to put in those other incidents that aren't otherwise concerning.
(4) The timing. This happened 40 years ago, assuming it happened, but only a month before an election are we first hearing of it. Roy Moore has been a public figure and stood for elections plenty of time. Will the accuser please point out why only now, at this specific point in an election, is she stepping forward?
If this did indeed happen, as I noted, it is contemptible and Moore should step away from the race. But suppose that, like Jackie Coakley, the accuser made this up, or at least exaggerated the incident beyond what actually occurred into something different? How, then, does one defend oneself against such accusations leveled a month from an election?
It's not like we can pass a law that you can't accuse a candidate of something within 90 days of an election. It's not like we can require proof or evidence, or anything else, before smearing a candidate. This is, after all, a free country, and people are free to speak whenever they want. But like the Phi Kappa Psis at UVa, you are entitled to ample opportunity to defend yourself against that free speech when it is turned on you.
And it is the public's obligation, in this case the voters of the State of Alabama, to consider the source, consider the four points I make above, and decide if they want it to affect their votes. It's just that they shouldn't have to. This accusation should have been made a long time ago, when it might have been taken as something other than a typical Democrat smear campaign.
I don't know what Roy Moore is going to do; heck, I don't even know what actually happened. Yesterday's additional allegations tell me that he needs an exit strategy pretty quickly. But if he doesn't, and this influences the election, then you can bet that politicians will pull that out of their playbooks as often as possible, and we will find a lot more accusations of sexual impropriety raised a few weeks before elections.
Moore himself should step away quickly. But this tactic on the part of his opponents is frightening to the rest of us. Aren't we all better than that?
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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