Former Vice President Joe Biden shouldn’t joke about complaints that he has made women uncomfortable with how he touches them in public, one potential 2020 rival said.
“I think it’s bullshit to say that people can get away with laughing it off,” former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, told HBO’s Bill Maher on Friday evening. “I think that that’s completely the wrong way to look at it.”
Castro, who is running for president and may face Biden in the Democratic primaries if the former Delaware senator enters the fray, acknowledged that “there are gradations” of unwanted contact between a man and woman.
But he rebuffed Maher’s praise for Biden, who has promised to “be more mindful about respecting personal space” but also joked about the issue.
“I’m sorry I didn’t understand more,” Biden told reporters on Friday. “I’m not sorry for any of my intentions. I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done. I have never been disrespectful intentionally to a man or a woman. So yeah, that’s not the reputation I’ve had since I was in high school, for God’s sake.”
Maher welcomed that response, and the liberal comedian had earlier said Biden should joke about the issue.
“I like that,” he told Castro. “I don’t think it’s that big a deal.”
That attitude isn’t good enough, after decades of women being to “just be quiet about stuff like this,” Castro maintained.
“It’s not just your intention it’s also how your actions are making somebody feel,” he said. “I think that there is a way to reconcile that and to me we’re going to really progress when you have workplaces that are able to take both of those two things seriously.”
