Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona refused to mince words after a number of “activists,” including a man and a self-identified illegal immigrant, stalked, harassed, and filmed her in a bathroom stall after one of her two classes at Arizona State University over the weekend. The Arizona Democrat blasted the protesters for their “unlawful activities such as gaining entry to closed university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom.”
But the leader of Sinema’s own party took a different tack.
When asked about the bathroom incident, President Joe Biden noted that while he did not consider the tactics “appropriate,” a man following a female senator into a women’s restroom at her place of work is just “part of the process.” The president, who also served in the Senate for nearly four decades without ever being filmed in a bathroom by political adversaries, added that “it happens to everybody.”
If you needed any indication that “#MeToo” ends at the moment a politician’s priorities begin, Biden just proved it. In any sane world, thugs filming a woman in a bathroom without her consent — according to Arizona native Meghan McCain, a class 5 felony in the state — would constitute the grossest sort of violation of a woman’s right to privacy and bodily autonomy. But because Sinema is on the wrong team (in this case, only supporting a whopping $1 trillion in spending on top of a $22 trillion national debt held by the public instead of an unprecedented $4.5 trillion), feminism flies out of the window.
Sinema isn’t even a Republican. She’s simply the sort of centrist Democrat that Biden used to pretend to be, and not even collegial Uncle Joe can muster an unequivocal and forceful condemnation of activists crossing an obvious line of basic human decency. The green light has been given to activists to escalate the force they use and the signal to the opposition clearly sent: Republican women, you’re up next.
