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And she does so, in the New York Times, for unapologetic partisan reasons:
Even after acknowledging that the case against Franken had gotten worse:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/opinion/harassment-allis-franken.html
Do you agree with her? Do you think putting party over principle is justified, or not?
Something in between?
Explain.
It’s possible that feminists, in trying to hold Democrats to standards that they wish were universal, risk unilateral disarmament. Kate Harding made this case in The Washington Post last Friday, arguing against Franken’s resignation. If Democrats “set this precedent in the interest of demonstrating our party’s solidarity with harassed and abused women, we’re only going to drain the swamp of people who, however flawed, still regularly vote to protect women’s rights and freedoms,” she wrote. And when the next Democratic member of Congress goes down, there might not be a Democratic governor to choose his replacement.
I’m partly persuaded by this line of reasoning, though conservatives mock it as the “one free grope” rule. It’s a strange political fiction that anyone can really separate partisanship from principle. In general, the character of the party that controls the government has a much greater impact on people’s lives than the character of individual representatives. Those who care about women’s rights shouldn’t be expected to prove it by being willing to hand power to people devoted to taking those rights away.
Yet just as there’s a cost for cutting good but imperfect men loose, there’s a cost to defending them from consequences we’d demand if the politics were reversed. It forces feminists to treat our own standards as unrealistic, to undermine our own arguments. Ultimately, however these dilemmas play out, we lose: either the moral high ground or men whom we need, admire and maybe even love.
Even after acknowledging that the case against Franken had gotten worse:
Then I saw the news that a woman named Lindsay Menz accused Franken of grabbing her butt while they posed for a photo at the Minnesota State Fair in 2010, when he was a senator, and I read Franken’s lame non-denial: “I feel badly that Ms. Menz came away from our interaction feeling disrespected.”
Yet I am still not sure I made the right call [for his resignation]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/opinion/harassment-allis-franken.html
Do you agree with her? Do you think putting party over principle is justified, or not?
Something in between?
Explain.