The Left loves to claim moral superiority over the Right when it comes to women, coining phrases like “the war on women” and claiming Republicans want to take America back back to the “Mad Men” era.
So you’ll have to excuse me for letting out a Nelson Muntz-style laugh over last week’s closure of a progressive public relations firm due to accusations of sexual harassment and assault.
FitzGibbon Media closed after several prospective and current female employees accused the founder and president, Trevor FitzGibbon, of harassment. One prospective female employee provided the Huffington Post with text messages showing Fitzgibbon asking her for inappropriate photographs.
The firm represented such major progressive clients as the Center for American Progress, MoveOn.org, NARAL Pro-Choice America and the AFL-CIO.
The closure and statements from other progressive PR officials that “this is probably a story you could tell at 15 other organizations” led the New Republic to declare that someone could be both liberal and a sexual abuser.
“They need to stop believing that liberalism elevates us over the possibility of being sexist, because that’s a Republican thing,” New Republic’s Jamil Smith wrote. “Nor should we assume progressivism based upon a few nice tweets, rah-rah columns or even actual work for liberal causes.”
Vox’s Emily Crockett added to the noise surrounding FitzGibbon with an article about “the problem of sexual harassment in the progressive movement.”
One woman who worked for a former client of FitzGibbon told Vox that “Trevor certainly isn’t the only one in the progressive space who has done this to me or women I’ve known, and he won’t be the last.”
Another strategist said she has worked in the movement for more than a decade, and has “never worked at a progressive organization or campaign where sexual harassment wasn’t an issue of some kind.”
Crockett noted the difficulty women in the progressive movement have when coming forward with such allegations. The women don’t want to come forward because they don’t want to “rock the boat” or suffer retaliation.
Another problem for progressive women coming forward, not mentioned by Vox, is suppression. If a Republican or conservative-leaning organization is accused of discrimination toward women, it’s front-page news. MSNBC will spend an entire day on the story, seeking more and more accusations. FitzGibbon and other progressives accused of sexual harassment receive only a few stories here and there in lefty outlets and many more in conservative outlets. The story has already been largely forgotten and will become nothing more than an anecdote used by the Right the next time they’re accused of not caring about women.
Perhaps the reason progressives think women in America are so oppressed is that they are treated unfairly in liberal spaces. Hollywood has a sexism problem, Democratic politicians (Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner, the Kennedys, Bob Filner, etc.) really do seem to be of the “Mad Men” era where sexual harassment and womanizing wasn’t just accepted but encouraged.
Supporting abortion-on-demand and sticking to the false narrative of the “gender wage gap” should not excuse progressives for bad behavior.
