The day after the tape with the notorious “p-bomb” explosion dropped on a stunned world, a coalition of so-called Values Voters — religious conservatives who organized in the 1980s to redeem a lost culture — reaffirmed their support for the p-bomb’s creator.
Trump is a devotee of Mammon if ever there was one, possessor of most of the sins and few of the virtues, breaker of rules and many commandments. His rallies are shout-fests that border on violence, his supporters are zealots who revel in bias, whose ego is massive and insights few. They see him as the man most able of all now running to uphold the word of the Bible and God.
Seriously.
Their excuse, such as it is, is that on paper at least, his views align more or less with the Republican platform, to which he came recently, having been a Democrat for most of his life. A cursory read of the Bible reveals no mention of the Republicans, or the Democrats, or the Whigs for that matter, but a great deal about timeless standards of decency. Somehow that part got lost in translation. Someday these people ought to tell us exactly what kind of Bible it is that they read.
Someday too, they will awaken to the fact that they have turned into the mirror-image of their enemies, the secular feminists. From their blameless ideal the women should be treated as equals, the feminists found themselves in the 1980s and ’90s locked into an endless cycle of damage control for an endless series of male politicians who similarly aligned to their ideas in principle, but displayed in their private behavior all that the movement was formed to oppose.
A JFK acolyte, Democrat Gary Hart copied his idol in all the wrong ways, and those only. Female lobbyists working in the abortion rights movement had to fight off liberal Republican Sen. Bob Packwood during most of their strategy meetings. Feminists covered for all of them, including Ted Kennedy, a groper and rake until his remarriage; and Bill Clinton, whose 1998 impeachment involving a harassment suit from a state employee and a fling with an intern brought denial to stunning new heights. Gloria Steinem created the free grope exception for liberal Democrats.
In the ’80s and 90s, a few voices rose (from feminists) suggesting that protesting abuse while enabling abusers might not be sustainable, but they were soon brushed aside. When Ted Kennedy’s involvement in his nephew’s rape trial made him lay low during the Hill-Thomas hearing, Eleanor Clift noted that “organized women’s groups overlooked a lot to stand by the senator. Feminists who proclaimed “the personal is the political, made an exception for [him.]”
The exception made for Kennedy then is exactly like that made now by the “Values Voters” for Trump. The same conservative Republicans who raged at Clinton’s misbehavior have now extended their own “free grope” to an overweight orange-haired former Democrat, ex-abortion backer and ex-Clinton friend who is gleefully trashing their party.
Values voters and feminists have more in common than they realize.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
