From Franken to Assange to Clinton, there can be no ideological exceptions for sexual assault

If you have been fortunate enough to have not yet seen the photograph here take a good look at it.

It is a picture of future US Senator -- then well-known comedian -- Al Franken molesting and sexually humiliating a female soldier named  Leeann Tweeden. In Canada this would legally qualify as sexual assault. In my opinion it morally and ethically does no matter where you are in the world, though sadly not all jurisdictions in the United States share this opinion.

Regardless, it is a sick, grotesque, petty and ugly act by a man who really can make no excuse for it.

He thought it was funny enough that he had someone snap a shot of it.

Think about that.

It takes a particular type of mind to want to photograph a sexual assault or humiliation as a laugh and that mind would be a disgracefully misogynist one.

It is also rare that an assault is 100% proven in advance of all the attempts to discredit the woman claiming it but here it is. The photo really speaks for itself unless you are delusional. It makes it impossibly hard not to believe her assertion that Franken also pushed her to engage in an aggressive kiss pretending it was a "rehearsal".

And yet many "liberals" and "leftists" on Facebook and twitter are rushing to his defense. People who generally claim to care about sexual assault and women's issues. People who would never excuse this behaviour if it had been done by a Republican or right-winger of any kind.

Sadly, there is nothing at all new about this. Liberals and lefties have done this before with figures like Bill Clinton and Julian Assange. And it has to stop.

Yes, Donald Trump is awful and a vicious misogynist.

Yes Roy Moore is a shameful rapist of young women.

That does not make what Franken did ok, it does not lessen its ugliness and it does not absolve him in anyway.

The "left" hypocrisy towards men like this is not just tiresome it is wrong on every level. We need to expose and be rid of folks on the left whose opposition to sexual assault and whose version of believing women is based on the ideology of the offender.

The violence and viciousness of sexual assault, domestic abuse and the sexual humiliation and objectification of women is intrinsic to patriarchy and the systemic oppression that activists and politicians on the left purport to oppose.

It is time for that to apply just as fully within what is broadly seen as our own ranks as it does when it happens on the right.

Further Readings:

No exception for Assange: Rape apologetics and the left

4 dudes and an accused rapist -- what some folks think passes for the "left" these days

Julian Assange

Have you all seen that Telesur article about "What 5 Leading Leftists Think About the UK Leaving the EU"?

I have. All over the place. Shared countless times.

And it is just an awful reminder of how far the left has to go.

Why?


Because, reading the piece they should make the title "What 5 MALE leftists think" as the folks who wrote it could not be bothered to find out what a single

leftist woman thought on this staggeringly important issue...you know in 20fucking16.

Five guys, four of them white, get to meditate on Brexit and represent the "left"!

Great.

And one of them is accused rapist Julian Fucking Assange. A man who is not a leftist -- at least not one that any of us should want to have anything to do with.

He is a man who has managed so far to flee justice despite the actual facts about the case against him that so many seek to continuously ignore.

For many leftists I guess "I believe women" only applies when it is the women you want to believe and when it does not involve rapists you see as heroes.



The reality that so many on the left seem to still admire this guy and seek out his opinion -- not for what he once may have done but still in spite of the facts about him that are well established -- is a depressing comment on the prevalence of misogyny and rape culture in our movements.

The fact that a major publication could post and that so many would share an all male lineup as somehow representative of leading leftist viewpoints in the here-and-now is not just tone deaf but distressing and pathetic.





We can and have to do better than this.