But,”Suck it up and make the utilitarian bargain,” and vote for the least contemptible rapist.
That is the message that Linda Hirshman, Lawyer, Author, and Feminist writes in the New York Times.
Let’s be clear: I believe Tara Reade. I believed Anita Hill, too. Remember the buttons? I wore one. What’s the constant here? Joe Biden, then the bumbling head of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
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So what’s a girl to do now? Discounting Ms. Reade’s accusation and, one after another, denigrating her corroborating witnesses, calling for endless new evidence, avowing that you “hear” her, is nonsense. We are now up to four corroborating witnesses — including one contemporary corroborating witness, unearthed by Rich McHugh, who was Ronan Farrow’s producer at NBC News during the Harvey Weinstein #MeToo reporting — and one “Larry King Live” tape.
So stop playing gotcha with the female supporters of Mr. Biden or the #MeToo movement, making them lie to the camera — or perhaps to themselves — about doubting her to justify their votes.
I’ll take one for the team. I believe Ms. Reade, and I’ll vote for Mr. Biden this fall.
I won’t say it will be easy. I have been writing on and agitating for women’s equality since “The Feminine Mystique” came out in 1963. I know how supposedly “liberal” men abused the sexual revolution in every imaginable way. I am unimpressed by their lip service to feminism, their Harvard degrees or their donations to feminist causes.
We all know that it is wrong to blow up buildings, but in the event that a fire were raging through a densely packed city, we might blow up buildings to create fire breaks as they did in the fires that followed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Her point is that Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee, and voting for him will be a an exercise in harm mitigation, but that is preferable doing that AND setting back the feminist movement as the response of the mainstream feminist movement did with Lewinski:
Utilitarian morality requires that I turn my face away from the people I propose to sell out: Monica Lewinsky, Tara Reade. This is agonizingly hard for me to do. Pretending not to believe the complainants — which is what is taking place with Ms. Reade — or that they’re loose nobodies, which is what much of the media did to Ms. Lewinsky, is just an escape from the hard work of moral analysis.
And it adds to the harm. How is feminism advanced by casting a reasonably credible complainant as a liar? Better to just own up to what you are doing: sacrificing Ms. Reade for the good of the many.
Trump is a danger to the Republic, and the world, in a way that Joe Biden will never be.
Just vote for him, and stop trying to make yourself feel good about it.