Posted on 01/25/2006 4:41:40 PM PST by mdittmar
Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., today called current U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas an "abomination" when compared with the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Marshall, the first black appointed to the Supreme Court, was the lead litigator on the historic 1954 school desegregation case and, as a justice, a champion of civil rights. He died in 1993.
Thomas was the second black appointed to the Supreme Court, and he succeeded the retiring Marshall in 1991 after being nominated by the first President George Bush. Thomas' televised confirmation hearings captured the nation's attention when Professor Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, a charge he denied.
As a justice, Thomas has been a staunch conservative who supports states' rights and opposes abortion and affirmative action.
Salazar's comment about Thomas came during a telephone news conference in which said he would not be part of any possible Democratic filibuster to stop a vote on the confirmation of Samuel Alito as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Thankfully he will be out of office soon. He is one of those hold your finger to the wind kind of RINO's. Good riddance.
And, I hope and pray that they continue their uncivilized ways and thereby remain forever in the minority!
It's pretty hard to misconstrue intent to sexually harrass when the boss mentions pubic hairs and uses the word "dong" at work to a female subordinate who is not enjoying such attention.
I started work before the sexual harassment laws were passed, and believe me, it was a zoo for women -- lots of inappropriate groping, flashing of private parts in the office and even in a restaurant with other co-workers present, sudden lunges and tongues down your throat (usually the ones with bad teeth or halitosis), you name it. Business lunches or obligatory office parties where there was liquor were the worst, even if the woman didn't drink. Or especially so.
This aggression was not limited to women who acted sexy; any woman, single or married, no matter how professional or unattractive, was fair game for some men. Even if the boss and co-workers were reliable, vendors or clients would try to take advantage, and threaten to tell the boss you were incompetent if you complained. Words truly can't express how sickening and often terrorizing it was, especially for the women who actually were raped in the workplace.
Facts are never irrelevant to me. But this matter of sexual harassment also involves feelings and socialization. At the time, most women had universally been raised to be passive; and the entire understanding of sexual harassment had not even come out of the shadows. Many women suffered in silence and others received this treatment from men regularly. That was certainly my experience as a not half-bad looking young woman in publishing, which is a high-adrenaline, deadline-oriented field full of aggressive personalities. Getting hit on, often with open salaciousness, was a weekly or even a daily aggravation. It was revolting.
Unbelievable! Who said if a**holes could fly, the senate would be an airport.
You're probably right that there was more to the story, and definitely right that they were both culpable in some fashion. But that's just the point. He was head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and it's not a stretch to say that he should never have allowed a personal relationship at the office to take place under any circumstances. It just made him a hypocrite. People may have had office affairs then, but it was seriously frowned upon and grounds for dismissal. What was he thinking?
The other thing to remember is that she did not contact the Committee and demand to tell her story; they called her and demanded her story due to her having told someone about it at the time. She did not set out to bring him down; the president's enemies did.
That's a long rambling reply that doesn't add any verification to your statement that you believe Anita Hill was sexually harassed by Thomas. OldFriend pointed out that Anita made her allegations to a friend BEFORE she worked for Clarence Thomas. So what's the proof for your statement. Hopefully not your rambling nuance above!
Wonderful story! Thanks!
We're still wrestling with the 15 year old . . . but he's getting his head on straighter these days.
You are exactly right!!!
Thomas, who was head of the Office of Equal Opportunity, should not have been involved in any way with a subordinate. Should. Not. So if the affair rumor was true, he got what he deserved.
If, as your roommate believed, there was no affair but an emotional "jilting", it sounds like Thomas did not handle a personnel problem effectively. Nevertheless, I believe the harassment took place pretty much as she described it, and her shock that the head of OEO could speak this way to a woman subordinate stuck in her craw. Being emotionally interested in someone is not an invitation to hear about "pubic hairs" and "Long Dong Silver" at work.
At the time, I was a single mother and sole proprietor doing my graduate work at night, so I did not follow every jot and tittle of the proceedings. But I do vividly remember her testimony. It's also worth noting that the system acquitted O.J. Simpson, William Kennedy Smith and Michael Jackson. People do lie. Even in Washington! :->
"Moderate" Democrat.
Huh.
With regard to the pubic hair remark, I would think that if the object in question did, in fact, look more like a pubic hair than anything else, such a remark would be indecorous but not necessarily outrageous. I recognize that one shouldn't use such indelicate terminology in an office context regardless of what something looks like, but if it really did look like a pubic hair, I wouldn't think someone who said so was necessarily trying to be offensive.
As for the movie reference, was Clarence talking to Ms. Hill about it directly, or talking to someone else about it within her earshot, or what? And what exactly did he say? Here again, there should be a distinction made between conduct which is unwisely indecorous, versus conduct which is designed to be offensive.
Justice Thomas seems to me like too upright a man to be involved with a subordinate. Anybody with sense knows that's trouble. And to blame a supervisor for poor managerial skills because a subordinate has a crush on him is silly. You don't know how he handled it, or if he even KNEW that she had a crush on him.
And given the fact that she has (1) been proven a liar many times over, especially the conversation that she supposedly had about Thomas BEFORE she went to work for him and (2) has had nothing but trouble in her subsequent jobs (especially at a university post where there was trouble with pubic hairs in exam papers, IIRC), I don't know why you're giving her ANY benefit of the doubt.
For those of us who are courtroom watchers, the critical moment was when the supposed witness to the complaint about Thomas was asked for the date of the conversation. She checked a date book or a telephone message slip and gave a reply that was NOT within the dates Hill worked for Thomas (but WAS during the time that she worked in a private law firm with a partner that was well known as a sexual harasser). The lawyer who was conducting the direct exam for the anti-Thomas crowd immediately called for a recess. That ALWAYS means trouble in a big way when it happens in the middle of a witness exam. The witness left the room with the lawyer for about 15 minutes, then returned and testified to a completely different date. IIRC, she was cross examined about it and said she was "mistaken" about the earlier date -- but she read it off a phone slip!
Any lawyer knows that when they went out of the room she was told, "That date is going to sink our entire case - change it NOW!" The fact that she willingly perjured herself "for the team" doesn't say much for her, either.
As I said, you're giving office gossip AND Ms. Hill way too much credit. (Plus, I know a liar when I hear one talking, since I was a courthouse lawyer for over 10 years and my livelihood depended on being able to tell the liars from the truth-tellers.)
So who are you, Arlen Specter? LOL! Getting hit on was the way business was done then, and there were no laws to protect you. So if you wanted to advance, you had to put up with it, ignore it or manipulate the situation in order get a job or to advance. That was just the way it was. Anita Hill testified about that. What did not make sense to the *males* and *lawyers* on the committee made perfect sense to me and many other women who had been in her shoes.
My own career suffered when I had to make the "choice" to try to continue with a philandering lecher boss or quit the corporate job. I quit and went freelance. Others stayed. Either way, you were gonna get screwed. At least I chose the economic route.
My personal opinion is that it was a moderately good acting job. But, if you prefer, an alternative explanation is that by that time she had convinced herself that it really happened. She had been cosseted and stroked by so many people, and encouraged so much, that I think that is really possible. I've seen some very deluded people convince themselves that they were seriously hurt in minor automobile accidents, even though there was no physical evidence of injury, no doctor or E.R. visits, and no complaints of pain until they lawyered up . . . but they weren't really lying, they had just talked themselves into it.
Anita Hill followed Thomas to the EEOC from the DOE where she was a tenured employee. Hill claimed that thomas sexually harassed her while both were at DOE. Following the harasser to EEOC simply destroyed her credibility.
This is why lawyers strike from juries people who have experienced a similar injury. Such people are far too likely to project their own feelings and emotions onto the party in question -- and believe that party just because they recount a similar experience to their own. "It must be true! The same thing happened to me!" skips a step in the reasoning process. I've been trained to ignore it when it happens to me, because that's my business, but we see this phenomenon over and over again -- many people are unable to separate their own experience from the case on trial.
But I think that Anita Hill devalues the real suffering of people who really were harassed, just as the "date rape victim" devalues the real suffering of rape victims.
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