Less than a year into his marriage to his third model wife, Donald Trump had two encounters with women engaged in what former President Dwight Eisenhower might have called the porn-star-and-sex-worker-industrial complex.
Some of his backers, those who call themselves the Moral Majority, don’t seem to care. “Let him who has not gotten into Twitter wars with porn stars over hush-money payments in the lower six figures cast the first stone,” they advise us. They don’t seem to realize that this would add up to a lot of stone-flinging. What’s more, they act as if their long years of expressing outrage and horror over similar offenses as incurred by some Democrats never had happened at all.
But this isn’t to single them out solely as hypocrites. Twenty years earlier, their opposite numbers had the same problem in the shape of former President Bill Clinton. Their reaction was similar: “Scandal? What scandal? What’s wrong about this?”
All of those women claiming Clinton had groped and/or raped them? They crawled out of trailer parks, looking for money. Accepting these things was the mark of adulthood. The French and the rest of the world thought we were crazy, and, (according to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.), gentlemen lied about sex all the time.
Some of these people making excuses were friends of the presidents, some employees, and all were members of the same party, whose boats might capsize if their captain went under, in which case their responses were sadly predictable.
But there were some others from whom more was expected, largely because they had told us to expect more. They were the flame keepers who were above and apart from the usual partisans; they were upholding core values of decency. On the Left and the Right, they held people to standards — until they stopped doing it.
Thus far, the Christian conservatives say, their flocks are behind them. But they should ponder the sad state of the National Organization for Women, or NOW.
Everyone knew about NOW in the 80’s and 90’s, when its leaders were famous and powerful women, able to foist a female vice president on Walter F. Mondale, to back Anita Hill to the hilt in the Hill-Thomas hearings, and to wrap it all up in the ‘Year of the Woman’, which brought in no less than four female senators, along with the gifts of Bill and of Hillary Clinton, who was a “new kind of First Lady” indeed.
NOW still exists in some form, but you have to go to its website to find it. Nobody knows the name of its leader, and it defines the idea of “spent force.”
NOW started to die just six short years after the Year of the Woman, in the “Year of Women Bill Clinton Exploited.” The reason? It chose to ignore the claims of all those women — of Kathleen Willey, that Bill Clinton had groped her; of Paula Jones, that he exposed himself to her; and the fact that he had carried on in the White House an affair of sorts with a then 22-year-old girl. It all proved that NOW wasn’t an organization for women at all, but an organization for people who could be helpful to Democrats.
In fact, NOW had passed itself off as something it wasn’t. The same could be said of Moral Majority, which doesn’t care about morals as any sane person defines them. Falwell et al., have a giant NOW problem, which may kill it off in the same fashion. Which would be just what it deserves.
