I am a liberal, and those fellow posters on here who either like or hate my posts, can attest to my leanings......
With that preface, I absolutely despise and have contempt for Roy Moore and would readily label him a hypocritical, right wing , slime bucket........HOWEVER, I cannot endorse the barrage of slander and libel heaped upon this guy based solely on the testimony of some women 40 years after the fact.
Moore has NOT been hiding for these last 4 decades and he has blustered his way into Alabaman politics ever since I can remember.....and NOT a peep upon these allegations has ever surfaced.
I hope Moore loses next month's election....BUT, he should lose because he is a scum bag and NOT based on allegations that should have been voiced many, many years ago.
I disagree with the idea that the allegations should be discounted because they are 40 years old. The question of why these women (and all women in all of the current instances of allegations, men reporting sexual assault and harassment too) didn't speak out earlier has been answered over and over and over again, ad infinitum. They were afraid: afraid they wouldn't be believed, afraid they would be vilified, afraid their lives would be ruined, afraid their families and children would be hurt by public scandal, afraid of losing their jobs, afraid their careers would be ruined, etc.
Why don't you people get it? Here you are discounting their testimony, disparaging them, doing just what they were afraid of. The reason there is such a barrage of accusations recently, the reason the dam has broken is because of a site that was set up called #MeToo (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_Too_(hashtag). It has caused those who were afraid to report what happened to them to be emboldened because others were reporting.
This type of sexual harassment and assault has gone on since the beginning of civilization; it's nothing new. But we haven’t talked about it. It's time to talk about it and not continue to sweep it under the rug.
It’s like child abuse. People didn’t talk about it. Children were afraid to report. We didn’t want to believe it. We didn’t trust what the children said. These people reporting sexual assault and harassment are not doing it to get back at someone or for political purposes, or if so it’s very, very few. They are doing it to free themselves of the self imposed guilt, shame and secretiveness, to open this issue up for our society to discuss it honestly.
It's a similar situation with reporting rape: "...out of 1000
rapes, 994 perpetrators will walk free. ...Only 344 out of every 1,000 sexual assaults are
reported to police."
The Criminal Justice System: Statistics | RAINN
Stop maligning and denigrating these reporters because they didn’t report it at the time, because they waited years, even decades to report it—understand why they waited and understand why they are reporting now.
What Moore did was illegal; they were reprehensible acts against children. People in public office should be the best of us, not the worst of us. That is why he shouldn’t be re-elected.
