“Remember who you are and whom you serve,” Eugene Robinson warned Christian conservatives just before Christmas last week. “Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say … with any seriousness for decades to come?”
Well said — and also perhaps prophetic. We all saw this movie 20 years ago when the feminist movement — a religion of sorts if one so defines it — had such a run-in of its own with its own special president. Through his behavior, President Bill Clinton mocked and disdained what both he and they claimed to prize most of all.
Like the religious Right today, the feminist Left didn’t seem to think twice before throwing its stated beliefs over the side in defense of a man who might shock and disgust them. They believed he could give them some policy outcomes that they had good reason to praise. In Vanity Fair in May 1998, the late and great Marjorie Williams could not find a single leader of women ready to chide their feminist president for exposing himself before Paula Jones, for groping White House volunteer Kathleen Willey, or for reportedly raping state employee Juanita Broaddrick in a hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1980s.
Given that easy forgiveness of far more serious sins in the feminist canon, it seems natural that they should also shrug off his Oval Office affair with a college-aged intern, even if they had been willing to feed Justice Clarence Thomas to the wolves for a bit of alleged dirty-talk that was mild in comparison.
“With very few exceptions, feminists were either silent or dismissive,” Williams informed us — unless, that is, they were blaming the victims themselves. “If anything, it sounds like she put the moves on him,” said Susan Faludi, author of Backlash, a feminist treatise.
“Whether it’s a fantasy, a set-up, or true, I simply don’t care,” said Betty Friedan, a feminist icon. “What about Ken Starr’s ‘humiliation’ of the women he dragged before the grand jury?” fumed Democratic California Rep. Nancy Pelosi. “We’re trying to think of the bigger picture … what’s best for women,“ said Eleanor Smeal, head of the National Organization for Women, a force in that era.
“Clinton is their guy,” Williams concluded. “Clarence Thomas was their enemy. Bob Packwood, a liberal Republican who was the next habitual boor to walk the plank, was a harder case for feminists, but in the end, they tied the blindfold. Clinton, though, is the hardest case because he is the most reliably supportive president they’ve ever had.”
Some (male) feminists would go even further, turning the crime of perjury into a chivalrous gesture on Clinton’s part, and even a positive good. “Gentlemen always lie about sex,” said Arthur Schlesinger Jr. William Styron published a letter suggesting this country was now being laughed at by its more worldly betters abroad. Erica Jong and some feminist friends expressed their distress that Clinton felt driven to paw at the help when she and her ilk would be happy to oblige him voluntarily.
It was talk such as this that would come back to bite them when Donald J. Trump appeared on the scene, and Democrats would find it convenient to go back and find morals again. Once again, they were shocked, shocked, that rich, powerful men sought female companionship and attempted to make it an issue, but that horse had left the barn 20 years earlier, and they let him out all by themselves.
Evangelicals can’t have it both ways, as Robinson tells us. Social conservatives should take a lesson, just as Robinson warns. Whatever rails they knock down today, they may one day need them themselves, and sooner rather than later.
