Consent Matters!
By Expanding on my brief thoughts from the weekend, I have a piece at the Prospect noting that the Filner scandal is a “violating women’s rights” scandal, not a “sex scandal”. The bottom line, since it discusses another case that merits more attention:
The conflation of consensual and nonconsensual behavior has the dual bad effects of trivializing the real scandals and overinflating the trivial ones. And the trivialization of sexual harassment is a serious problem. Consider the case of Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the New York state assembly, who quietly settled sexual harassment claims brought against Assemblyman Vito Lopez with taxpayer money rather than making them public. In a thoroughly unsurprising development, Lopez was accused of sexual harassment again. Lopez was finally forced to resign, but for Silver to have allowed young women to continue to be unknowingly assigned to Lopez given his history is unconscionable. Alas, it seems as if Silver will keep his job. If Filner does too, it will be a depressing commentary on the ongoing failure of too many political elites to take sexual harassment seriously. That’s a real scandal.
As far as I can tell, Silver seems secure in his position, which is pretty appalling. I don’t have the highest expectations of our public officials, but I would like to think that when I recommend my students for an internship at the Assembly that they’re not knowingly being assigned to sexual predators.