Category: Civil Rights

Storm warning

First, point out to anyone who complains when all of the ballots in Tuesday’s elections have not been counted by their bedtime Tuesday night and says that is evidence of widespread voter fraud that that is pure bull.  All the votes have probably never been counted just a few hours after the polls are closed, certainly not in an era when we encourage everyone to vote and accommodate their exercise of their rights with early voting and voting by mail and voting from overseas and such modern developments.  And second, don’t listen to anyone who argues on election night that there is evidence of widespread voter fraud – especially if they do so on the Fox “News.”  First, it would take a thorough investigation to prove that accusation.  Second, no such investigation has ever proven that fraud pervasive enough to change the results of elections has ever happened.  (OK, retiring the italics now.)

I don’t know what the results of Tuesday’s elections will be, but I feel confident we won’t find that the poisonous political divide across our country has miraculously healed.  The fight for democracy, as some have cast it, won’t be over whenever this week’s votes are finally tallied, because the fight never ends.  “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance” said…someone, I guess, but apparently not Mr. Jefferson despite many citations, but it’s a great thought to keep in mind: any system designed to guarantee freedom will face threats from those who find your freedom and mine an impediment to their own power.  (You know who I mean.) So how do we keep our spirits up in the face of that on-going threat?  Dahlia Lithwick has a great prescription in Slate.

It is easy to feel despair. The folks who keep disparaging those who worry about the future of democracy seem uninterested in the fact that one party refuses to accept election results, inflames election violence, admits the entire plan is one-party rule, and brushes off and even jokes about vigilante violence. Those same people have been adept at pushing us into semantic arguments about whether we’re using the right words to describe what we see happening right before our eyes. The problem with wasting our time fighting about whether the best word to use in this particular situation is “authoritarianism,” or “fascism,” or “vigilantism,” or “lawlessness,” is that such things can often only ever be empirically established in retrospect. We can hold the I Told You So Olympics in 10 years. Let’s get that on the books.

Call it whatever you like, but this speedy descent into a world in which people who are fundamentally unethical and unserious hold too many levers of power is not normal and it’s not funny. Even for the people striving to find meaning and purpose in the ugliness, the temptation to cede ground, give up, and go small is alluring. That they want you to cede ground, give up, and go small is in fact the problem we can name right now.

My rabbi recently reminded me of a useful way to think through the fog. Citing another spiritual hero last weekend, Aurora Levins Morales, she reminded me that there is always a difference between the weather and the stars. Morales, teaching in 2017, warned that it is too easy to be buffeted by the changeable weather, and in so doing, to lose sight of the immutable stars. The stars, in this telling, are a “constant to steer by, sometimes hidden by storm clouds, but high above them, untouched by wind or rain.”

The weather is different. Weather, Morales conceded, can be “violent, drenching, harsh.” But it isn’t constant. If we do nothing but chase and feel the weather, she wrote, “we could spin forever from emergency to emergency, shouting no to each new crime—but that would be steering by chasing clouds.”

The weather, and the stars: I think that’s a great way to think about it.  There’s the weather, that which we see every day and which changes day to day and in some cases hour to hour—it seems big and important, but it’s transient within the span of our own observation.  The stars, although not permanent in that firmament, can give each of us something long-lasting to steer by.  Lithwick again:

I spent the week before midterm elections that could help determine the fate of democracy in the United States trying to pick my own way through a careening mess of the world into those buckets: Weather versus star. Elon Musk is weather; so is Marjorie Taylor Greene. Tucker Carlson is weather. Even losing tens and thousands of followers on Twitter is, respectfully, just weather. It all matters, sure, and it’s all painful. But it’s a series of transient states to distract you from what is real.

Stars are the things that don’t ebb and flow with the showy Twitter feuds, or the mutable hourly outrages, or public performances of ghastly daily mediocrity. For some of us, the stars are the upcoming elections and the extraordinary acts of voter registration, postcarding, election protection, and democratic engagement. For some of us the stars are the law, the rule of law, and the efforts to bring accountability for lawbreaking. For some of us the stars are efforts to build a tolerant, pluralist world in the face of rising racial and religious intolerance and xenophobia.

(snip)

As we move through the frightening and destabilizing days to come, the weather will attempt to consume more and more of your time and attention and energy. Fascists will tweet more fascism to try to distract you from the impacts of their fascism. My entirely inadequate advice will remain unchanged: Sit in the foulness of the roiling storm and do your work, whatever that may be, and triangulate by the light of whatever star feels eternal to you. Take care of your family; they need you, and take care of your health. Take care of your community; it needs you, and take care of someone in your community who doesn’t know Twitter is even a thing. Vote. Help others vote. Register voters. Staff voter protection hotlines. Place your own body between someone unkind and someone vulnerable. Read a book. Help a kid. Give someone food and love and respect. Donate something you don’t use. Ask for help. Don’t give your time or attention to anything small enough to diminish you along with it.

We’re in the weather, and the temptation to do nothing but talk about the weather is fierce. But above and beyond there are still fixed and immutable values and principles and we must try as best we can to steer by those things instead.

(snip)

You won’t always be able to see them, but the stars are still there. And we will get through the storms ahead, even if we don’t yet believe it, because the storms are not the story. We are the story. Keep looking up.

Dear Founding Fathers,

The public discourse here in America in the 21st Century has become so bizarre that I’m having trouble keeping it sorted…having trouble understanding what’s going on.  Not that it’s your responsibility to help, but I thought that trying to explain some of it to you might help me clear my head, so here goes.

Republican members of the House and Senate in Washington have blocked plans for a Congressional investigation of the attack on the Capitol back in January, on the day that Congress was certifying the results of last year’s election for president and vice president.  They did so with an explanation that defies facts and logic, something they have become very practiced at offering.  The plan approved by the House had been negotiated by members of both parties, with the Republicans asking for changes to the original idea to make sure it would not be a partisan witch hunt aimed at damaging their party before next year’s Congressional elections.  The Democrats accepted all the changes the Republicans asked for, yet just 35 House Republicans voted for it, and then it failed in a Senate vote with only six Republican senators voting in favor.  Why?  The Senate Republican leaders said the plan would be a “partisan kangaroo court” intended to damage Republicans and the recent former president of their party.  Some of these same Republicans—who were physically present in the Capitol that day and saw what happened; who hid from the mob with their colleagues—are now asking us to believe that the whole thing was either just a bunch of tourists visiting, or was actually orchestrated by liberals.

This came two weeks after the Republicans threw out their own #3 leader in the House.  Liz Cheney of Wyoming, daughter of the former vice president and as hard-line a conservative Republican as they come, was tossed for being insufficiently servile to the former president, for insisting on accepting the evidence of her own senses and denouncing his behavior in continuing to claim that the election was stolen from him, despite there being no evidence of any voter fraud significant enough to have made a difference.

…at the end of the day, the problem isn’t that Cheney is making controversial statements; the problem is that Republicans consider her obviously true statements to be controversial.

In a recent tweet that sent the move to ditch her into overdrive, Cheney wrote in response to a Trump statement calling his election defeat THE BIG LIE: “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.” This should not be considered provocative.

That’s the National Review talking there!

The Big Lie is leading Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country to pass new laws that will make it harder for some people to vote, and easier for state officials to manipulate election results…for their own benefit and that of their party.  And it’s all being done right in front of our faces.

Republican legislators claim they’re tightening up election procedures to address (unfounded) concerns about fraud in the 2020 election. But what’s really behind this effort is a group of conservative Washington insiders who have been pushing these same kinds of voting restrictions for decades, with the explicit aim of helping Republicans win elections. The difference now is that Trump’s baseless claims about 2020 have given them the ammunition to get the bills passed, and the conservative movement, led by Heritage, is making an unprecedented investment to get them over the finish line.

“We’re working with these state legislators to make sure they have all of the information they need to draft the bills,” Anderson told the Heritage Foundation donors. In addition to drafting the bills in some cases, “we’ve also hired state lobbyists to make sure that in these targeted states we’re meeting with the right people.”

Democrats in the Texas Legislature found a temporary way to fight back on Sunday night: they walked out just before a procedural deadline, denying the state House a quorum, and killed the “bad ol’ bill” that Republican leadership was pushing.  The Republican governor says he will call a special session to start the process over again (absolutely his prerogative) and cut funding for the legislative branch (absolutely his predictable, childish response).

There’s been good news lately on the fight against COVID-19.  Thanks to so many people finally wearing a mask, and to so many getting vaccinated, the number of deaths is at its lowest level in ten months, the positive rate among those being tested is below five percent, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently loosened its guidelines on who should wear masks and when—as it should when conditions call for it.  More places are beginning to open up.  (The chief government administrator for the county that includes Houston, who has been among the most strident anywhere for telling people to wear masks and keep their distance, downgraded the threat level—twice!—in the past week!)  What we’ve been doing is finally showing signs of working.  If you think that has people finally conceding the efficacy of those actions, you’re thinking wrong: here’s the news of Houston hospital employees (most are not health care providers) suing their employer over its requirement that they get vaccinated if they want to keep their jobs.  They claim that since the vaccines have only ever been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use, any requirement to take the vaccine amounts to “nonconsensual human experimentation” under a code of medical ethics adopted in response to Nazi atrocities during World War II.  Their lawyer is “a former chairman of the Harris County GOP who has launched numerous legal challenges related to the pandemic, including a ban on in-person worship services last year.”

These people are…well, choose your own word for what it is when a member of Congress compares a COVID-fighting mask requirement from the speaker of the House to the Nazi extermination of Jews–

(Please note, the Christian Broadcasting Network “journalist” conducting the interview nods along as if she’s saying nothing more controversial than that the sun rises in the east.)

Holding different political beliefs is one thing, but it’s becoming damn near impossible to discuss anything when some of our “leaders” appear to have lost their minds.  This Democrat (no relation) is barely containing his disgust:

Why…the big question has to be, why are so many Republicans now the way they are.  On the specific question of the January 6 investigation, I think S.E. Cupp has it absolutely right—they are complicit in the crime, and are trying to protect themselves!

CNN conservative commentator S.E. Cupp on Friday pondered the purpose of her party ― the GOP ― after Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan probe into the deadly Capitol riot.

“My question to the Republican party would be, what are you here for? What is your function if not to preserve the republic and protect American democracy?” Cupp told “The Lead” anchor Jake Tapper.

“If you have no curiosity about what happened on Jan. 6, first of all, I think it’s just because you believe it will implicate you … But also, I’m not sure what you stand for as a party,” she said.

(snip)

“The point of having two strong parties is to bring a competition of ideas to the table,” she said. But while Cupp admitted to not agreeing with many Democratic proposals, at least it wasn’t the “gibberish” and “nonsense” coming from across the aisle.

“Talking about Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head and conspiracy theories and lies,” she said of Republican focus in recent months. “Making inane, absurd comparisons between the Nazis and mask mandates.”

(snip)

It’s “incredibly embarrassing to watch an American political party cower just to fetishize and service the emotional narcissism of one guy, the guy who, by the way, lost it all for you,” she said, calling it “maddening,” “infuriating” and “a disgrace.”

That’s coming from a confirmed Republican.

I’ve got to keep in mind that not all Republicans have hopped on the crazy train.  But there are enough off them out there—and I mean, way out there—that it’s frightening.  What is driving this?  Not admiration for the last Republican president, I think…it’s clear that very many national party leaders are disgusted by him.  Always were, still are.  But, I think they see the advantage he brings to their side in the culture war, lining up a not-insignificant segment of Americans who see themselves inevitably losing their privileged place in society, and who appear willing to “do what it takes” to hold onto it.  As Amber Ruffin puts it, “resisting change means maintaining power.  And that’s why they’re fighting to keep racist children’s books and Confederate statues, and that’s why they’d rather talk about cancel culture than domestic terrorism.”  Worth your time to watch this clip…

Thanks for the sympathetic ear…thanks for the terrific country, too. We’ll keep doing our best…

The winter of my discontent has spilled over into the spring

You’d have thought that two months would have been plenty of time.  Time for Americans to take a calming breath, relax a bit, and let the radicalization of thought and action spurred by “the former guy” just naturally subside.  Time for passions to cool.  Time for the recognition of fact versus fiction.

Nope.

Four years of cognitive dissonance generated by the primary source of fake news in our lives reached its crescendo in early January when thousands of people claiming to hold an unwavering belief in law and order ignored the provable facts and attacked the seat of government of the country they swore they loved.  Hundreds of law enforcement officers were injured by the “patriots” who took the law into their own hands that day and tried to overturn the results of a free and fair election because they didn’t like the result.

The man impeached for inspiring that assault has left office, but the “the crazy” is still in the house.  He wasn’t the cause, it turns out; just a catalyst.

I daresay we all know at least a few of these people.  The stone cold racists.  The Christian Nationalists trying to make the United States a “Christian nation” even though the Constitution prohibits that.  The self-styled “conservatives” for whom anything can be said if it annoys their political opponents and inspires their own supporters, with adherence to actual accuracy or consistency with their own past statements not required.

They took advantage of having a mainstream leader—it don’t get any mainstreamer than the White House—who was willing to support their radical beliefs to force a massive change in the course of American society.  For four years, it was working.  They didn’t count on Dear Leader being so thoroughly self-absorbed and delusional that he refused to lead the country against the ravages of a global pandemic, a failure which generated enough antagonism that it inspired the record voter turnout that caused his defeat.

MAGA nation has always been there; it came out of the shadows in 2016, and it’s not done.

For those with no self-esteem and no affinity for truth, the blatant and self-serving lying is still going strong.  (Recent examples here and here.)  The flow of ludicrous conspiracy theories and disinformation is unrestrained—such as Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, “an all-access purveyor of misinformation on serious issues such as the pandemic and the legitimacy of American democracy, as well as invoking the etymology of Greenland as a way to downplay the effects of climate change.”  The absence of any need for intellectual consistency has never been more apparent: a lawyer who is being sued for defamation by a voting machine company she trashed for weeks is defending herself by claiming that “no reasonable person” would have believed the things she claimed in an actual legal filing were actually true!

Many Republicans across the country acknowledge that they have a problem: there are too many Americans who have not drunk the kool-aid and are not voting for Republicans. So they are taking action to make it harder for those people to vote at all.

More than 250 bills have been introduced in 43 states that would change how Americans vote, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice, which backs expanded voting access. That includes measures that would limit mail voting, cut hours that polling places are open and impose restrictions that Democrats argue amount to the greatest assault on voting rights since Jim Crow.

First across the finish line is the great state of Georgia.  In the state where a Republican secretary of state effectively told a sitting president soliciting his cooperation in voting fraud to shove it, the Republican legislature passed and the Republican governor signed an “overhaul of state elections that includes new restrictions on voting by mail and gives the legislature greater control over how elections are run.”

Among other things, the law requires a photo ID in order to vote absentee by mail, after more than 1.3 million Georgia voters used that option during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also cuts the time people have to request an absentee ballot and limits where ballot drop boxes can be placed and when they can be accessed.

Democrats and voting rights groups say the law will disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color. It is part of a wave of GOP-backed election bills introduced in states around the nation after former President Trump stoked false claims that fraud led to his 2020 election defeat.

The effort in Georgia and elsewhere—including my state of Texas, sad to say—are marketed as laws designed to provide greater ballot security and give voters reassurance about the integrity of election outcomes.  This presupposes your belief in the old GOP chestnut that elections now are not secure and that the outcomes are not legitimate.  Which, of course, is untrue—look at the literally dozens of lawsuits pursued across the country by Republicans trying to change the outcome of the presidential race last year, which could not prove voter fraud sufficient to have changed any results.  No one can reasonably argue that there is no election fraud, ever, anywhere, but there has never been evidence of the kind of massive voter fraud—ever, anywhere—that Republicans falsely assert as reason to make voting harder.  Even to the extent, in Georgia, of making it illegal to give a bottle of water to anyone waiting in line to vote.

Republicans who recognize actual truth understand this: their party controls the legislatures in 30 of the 50 states, and thus the redistricting process in those states, which goes a long way to perpetuate their electoral strength in legislative and congressional elections despite their national weakness.  (Democrats redistrict to their own benefit, of course, but they don’t have as many opportunities.)  In the 2020 election for president, 84.1 million Americans voted for someone other than the Republican incumbent, and another 80.8 million Americans didn’t vote at all, so nearly 70% of Americans who are eligible to vote turned thumbs down at another four years of Republican control of the White House.  In an election where more Americans voted than ever voted before, less than one-third of Americans voted Republican at the top of the ballot.  If Republicans want to hold on to power, they know they had better use their majorities while they still have them.

So must the Democrats in Congress.  The For the People Act, passed by the House of Representatives and awaiting action in the Senate, is an effort to negate the Republican attempts to make voting more difficult: it would expand voting rights, and limit gerrymandering, and take precedence in these areas over any laws passed in the states.  We’ll see.

Meanwhile, Republicans and conservatives seem intent on amusing us with their crying and whining.  The party that used to be all about personal responsibility can’t shut up about being the victims of cancel culture when they get caught doing the very things for which they criticize others.

2020 vision

If we were to treat this like a “regular” election between “regular” candidates, it would be sensible to compare the candidates’ core beliefs and positions on important issues.  The problem with that, in this case, is not only that Donald Trump is not a regular candidate, he has no core beliefs or strong positions on any issues.

Very important to remember (and I’ve been harping on this, I know): Trump lies.  About everything.  Virtually every word out of his mouth.  There is no good reason to believe anything he says.  The Washington Post Fact Checker documented 20,000 lies by Trump as president, and that was back in July.  (As they say, the hits just keep on coming.)   If in any moment Trump needs his audience to think that he believes A, because he thinks the audience members believe A, he will say he believes A.  If in another moment he needs another audience to think he believes not-A, he will say he believes not-A.  It doesn’t matter to him whether he really does like A or actually prefers not-A, or if he’s even given the whole A/not-A dichotomy any real consideration: he will say anything if he wants it to be true in that moment.  What’s more, he thinks we are too stupid to realize that he has taken both the position of A and not-A at one time or another.

Also important to remember is that Trump has demonstrated he is not good at presidenting.  I mean being president of the USA—don’t even talk about his record of business bankruptcies.  He touts his handling of the economy, but he denies that he took office with an economy that was in pretty good shape and managed not to screw it up.  (By the way, the stock market is not “the economy.”)  He quickly reminds you about passing a tax cut bill…one that primarily benefitted the already-wealthy, AND which he doesn’t want you to remember is only temporary, AND WHICH was contributing to a big increase in government debt even before pandemic relief.

Oh yeah, the pandemic.  Any government effort to protect Americans from an insidious virus that was spreading across the country and killing thousands of people a week would have started by asking people to isolate themselves, and that was what forced so many businesses to temporarily close and shocked the U.S. economy back in the spring.  Once medical researchers identified the transmission path AND a simple and efficient way to block it—yes, the mask—a good president (and governors and mayors) would have been working like hell to get people to voluntarily help themselves and their neighbors by wearing the damn mask.  Other countries did, and they did not suffer the rates of infection and death that America has; they have not suffered the economic hardships that we have.  Trump’s willful mismanagement of the government’s response to COVID-19 is likely to be his legacy: his public denial of the problem, which contributed to the expansion of the problem, which led to more than 9 million infections and the deaths of more than 213,000 Americans (so far) along with the prolonged weakening of the economy.  You’ve probably heard: a third wave is already underway.

(Recently I read a woman’s complaint about wearing the mask; she feels she should not have to do that because “they have already taken so much away from us.”  Honest to god, lady: no one set out to take anything away from you.  There is an attack against our country underway right now, and our best response to the threat—which will help protect you, your children, your neighbors—calls for you to make a tiny sacrifice.  Why is this a problem?  It almost couldn’t be any easier.  Also: who is “they?”)

Very important to keep in mind—maybe most important—is that Trump does not believe in America, or its Constitution, or the rule of law, or our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or in racial or gender equality, or supporting the sacrifices of our fellow citizens in the armed forces, or in any type of service to country.  He doesn’t believe in Truth, or Justice, or the American Way.  He says he does, but he doesn’t.  (Remember, Trump lies.)

He ran for president as a publicity stunt, and was as surprised as anyone when he (barely) won.  He has used the office to enrich himself and his businesses, he’s alienated our allies, and he’s used the government itself to attack protesters and political enemies—he was impeached for doing that!  He wasn’t removed from office for it because he has also, somehow, managed to drag the Republican Party and a lot/many/most (?) of its leaders down to his level.  They talked themselves into believing that protecting Trump is what “real Americans” want them to do, because…why again?  Because with Trump as president they will get judges who will incorporate their political and religious beliefs into American law?

There was an ad on television the other day (please, Jesus, end the TV ads!) in which the candidate looked sincerely into the camera and told me “this election is about getting our economy moving again.”  No; no, it’s not.  I understand why you say that, and that would be a very good thing to get the economy back up to speed…also, to be able to go to a restaurant or a ballgame again, or even back to the office.  But no, that’s not what this election is about.

This election is about saving the United States of America from the chaos and fascism and authoritarianism that is undoubtedly right around the corner if Donald Trump wins re-election.  Even if Joe Biden is not everything you want in a president, he is one thing you need in a president: he is not Donald Trump.  He is a patriot, and he will govern with the best interests of this country at heart.  Just ask these Republicans:

You could also ask yourself, when was the last time I remember a president promising me that the next election was going to be rigged…unless he wins?  The last time a president running for re-election, and his political party, spent so much time making it harder for people to vote, and laying the groundwork to overturn the results?

He’s a clown…a cartoon.

Vote him out of office next week.  Do it for America.  A landslide may not be enough—let’s make it an avalanche that will also defeat whatever nonsense he pulls to try to ignore our votes and hold onto office (and stay out of jail).  That will make America great again.

You don’t need to be “deaf, dumb and blind” to be fair

Read this from Vox.com, this is very good.  It’s helped me think more clearly in considering whether there’s been a rush to judgment against men recently accused of sexual assault and harassment.

First, I’ll go out on a limb and say, I’m against sexual harassment and sexual assault.  I’m against men with professional or financial power using that power against women.  I believe the women who are making the accusations, especially when the men choose not to put up much of a defense and just disappear (anyone hear anything from Charlie Rose lately?); I do not reject the accusations just because they are being made by women, or because I believe that the men are somehow being treated unfairly.

I have wondered if there are cases in which the past has been turned on its head.  Used to be, a woman’s accusation of misconduct against her boss, for example, was dismissed out of hand as not being credible, and the justice system has long made it difficult for a woman to prosecute a case against her rapist…men in charge protecting other men lest they be the next to stand accused.  But since The New York Times and The New Yorker broke stories about movie producer Harvey Weinstein last year, the tide has turned and we’re told we must believe the woman.  #MeToo proponents and others argue that women who have been harassed or assaulted do not lie about it.  OK, I’m with you.  But are there women who were not harassed or assaulted who are lying, who are making false accusations?  In our newfound effort to correct past wrongs, are we being appropriately concerned about that possibility?

Dozens of power brokers have been the subject of allegations of abuse and sexual misconduct since Bill O’Reilly was ousted from Fox News in April 2017. And as more and more figures face consequences — financial, political, professional, and legal — for their bad behavior, one term that comes up over and over again is “due process,” referring to the legal concept enshrined in the Constitution.

Even President Donald Trump is in on it: In a tweet on Saturday, apparently prompted by the resignations of two of his aides, Rob Porter and David Sorensen following allegations of domestic abuse, the president lamented the number of “lives being shattered” by a “mere allegation” of misconduct. “Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?” he asked, almost plaintively. But what does due process really mean today, now that people have begun to invoke it as a cultural concept?

I asked seven legal scholars and experts what due process is, with the understanding that in legal circles the question is essentially an existential one. Due process in court is one thing — in the court of public opinion, it is a much more fluid notion, entangling questions of what is fair, what is reasonable to believe, and what rings emotionally true.

The first of the seven, former federal judge Shira Scheindlin, makes a case that I find very clear and persuasive, clarifying that “due process” in a court of law is not the same as that which a reasonable man or woman should give to public accusations such as these:

The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, provides, inter alia, that “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” This legal standard means what is says. Certainly Rob Porter, and others who have been accused of sexual abuse or harassment, are not being deprived of their life or their liberty as a result of the allegations made against them. Property is a closer question in that some have lost their jobs — and the income resulting from that employment — as a result of accusations rather than proof in a court of law. Nonetheless, in most instances the question is not one of civil or criminal liability. Rather, the question is whether given the quality of the allegations, the person against whom the allegations have been made, should remain in the position of trust, confidence, and responsibility which he (and it usually is he) currently holds.

(snip)

But when a business, a government entity, or a voter must decide whether someone is fit for his position, the decision process is of necessity much less formal, quicker, and truncated. A judgment call must be made and it often must be made quickly. The due process of a court action is often a very complicated and lengthy affair, involving pre-trial discovery, witnesses, and a judicial proceeding. But given the stakes of loss of life or liberty that makes sense. In context, the accusations that cause a person to lose his job must be evaluated by the employer who must make a judgment call based on the strength of those allegations. There is nothing wrong with that. If the person removed from his position feels aggrieved he is welcome to bring a case in court in which he would have the burden of showing that he was wrongfully terminated. In that proceeding I have no doubt that the underlying accusations would be fully aired. That may be why so few — if any of the accused — have pursed this course.

Law professor and author Michael Meltsner of Northeastern University agrees that there is a distinction between due process as a legal concept as compared to a societal norm, and warns that raising that flag in these cases “can be an ideological screen behind which abusers or those defending them try to justify, deflect or delay condemnation.”  (He didn’t say it here but it made me think of President Trump, the credibly-accused, and self-confessed, harasser and assaulter of girls and women.)

What often gets lost in the wake of allegations of sexual abuse is that even the most flexible construct of due process focuses us on a struggle for fairness in the face of our human tendency to rush toward moral judgment. But just as importantly, due process isn’t deaf, dumb, and blind. It is essentially evidence-based, so where the facts have emerged — and we have a plethora of such examples now before us — no one need hesitate to pass judgment. At the same time, due process suggests being wary of broadsides that read all accusations identically. Human behavior, especially where sex, gender and power are concerned is often hard to fathom. Because one size rarely fits all, we are constantly challenged to name, call out, and demand action while at the same time accepting nuance and complexity. If this suggests closing your Twitter account, so be it.