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Hate Crimes and Love Crimes
May 25, 2000
What if
Juanita Broaddrick had had a derringer? There, in a nutshell, is the
case against gun control. It may also explain why Mrs. Broaddrick’s
alleged rapist passionately favors limits on the right to bear arms.
The alleged rapist was the attorney
general of Arkansas. He is now the president of the United States. Even in
1978, when the incident is said to have happened, it might have made
national headlines if a state attorney general had been shot dead, or given
a low-caliber vasectomy, while trying to rape a woman. Maybe not
Lewinsky-sized headlines, or even Chappaquiddick-sized headlines, but
headlines.
 The
alleged rapist has never denied the charge. When asked about it at a press
conference, he referred the question to his lawyer. His vice president,
when asked whether he believed the charge, gave an evasively affirmative
answer: instead of saying he didn’t believe it, he replied that such
things must be pardoned as “mistakes” in the
president’s “personal life.”
It’s easy to imagine the
president’s blood running cold at the idea of women carrying pistols
in their purses. He has proposed new federal programs for just about every
trendy cause, including “women’s issues” — with
the conspicuous exceptions of sexual harassment and rape, on which he
has been oddly silent.
Is there a personal reason for his
avoidance of these topics? Does he feel an instinctive empathy with
certain criminal types? Consider the profile of his legislative
enthusiasms and aversions:
• He favors gun control. (He has been accused of rape and other
forms of sexual aggression; a single armed woman might have ended the
fun for him.)
• He favors legal abortion. (He is a promiscuous male, one of
whose former mistresses, Gennifer Flowers, says he gave her $200 to
abort his child by her.)
• In two terms as president, he has said nothing about the
problem of sexual harassment. (He has been repeatedly charged with
molestation of varying degrees, far beyond what Anita Hill alleged against
Clarence Thomas. These include exposing himself, uninvited fondling, and
outright assault.)
• He supports “gay rights.” (He can’t afford
to be judged by conventional moral standards; he flourishes under
conditions of limitless “sexual freedom,” in which all vices
are shielded — even promoted — in the name of
“privacy.”)
The president’s agenda seems
to be shaped in part by his personal needs. This is especially true of those
items in which he parts company with his liberal and feminist allies.
He can be stern about “hate
crimes,” but sexual crimes seem not to stir his vast capacity for
indignation, compassion, and the formulation of new federal programs to
cope with “national problems.” Comparatively rare
“hate crimes” demand comprehensive action, but far more
common sexual crimes — or perhaps we should call them “love
crimes” — can be tolerated.
This is a president who likes to
embrace safe causes. What could be safer than the cause of rape victims?
Both conservatives and feminists agree on this one. It would be a natural
for Bill Clinton.
Except that he is the alleged rapist of
Juanita Broaddrick (and perhaps other Jane Does). Rape is not an issue to
which he wants to direct the nation’s attention. Neither does he
want to excite public fury against sexual predators. These
“safe” causes are hazardous for him.
Sensing this, his liberal and feminist
allies have soft-pedaled them for his sake. They have ridiculed Paula
Jones, questioned the motives of Kathleen Willey, and ignored Juanita
Broaddrick. As for Monica Lewinsky, that was “consensual”
and “private.”
We are no longer reminded that
powerful men prey on powerless women in the workplace every day;
you’d think this ubiquitous problem had utterly vanished since
1992. Even Hillary Clinton, who once praised Anita Hill for raising public
consciousness on this issue, has completely dropped the subject in her
New York Senate campaign.
So Clinton’s libidinal interests
have reshaped the entire liberal-feminist agenda. Once again we live in an
America where a business executive may safely hit on his young
secretary.
As they say, the personal is the
political. No other president has made the law a tool of personal interest
as this one has. Or, according to an older slogan: “Private vices,
public benefits.” At least for sexual predators, who can take refuge
in the long shadow of Bill Clinton.
Joseph Sobran
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