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That’s good, but seriously... guns are the only metaphor Americans understand?

DSGamer wrote:

That’s good, but seriously... guns are the only metaphor Americans understand?

I don't think that's necessarily it. It's about how people imagine themselves to be powerless.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that Paleocon's coworker was a white guy. For a lot of people in America, but especially for white men, the only scenario of power imbalance that they've actually seriously considered and made plans for is a mass shooting. Perhaps the only other situations would be your boss directing you to do something illegal and threatening to fire you if you didn't, or a child speaking out against being abused.

Exploitation of the vulnerable and the protection of the perpetrator by structures of power is more of an abstract concept the higher up the ladder of privilege you get. The power imbalance of a shooter situation is a more concrete example that, sadly, every single person I know has made plans for or thought about how to respond to.

That said, the one thing that I do think the mass shooter metaphor misses is the very real likelihood that Moore's victims didn't speak out because they were told, either implicitly by our culture or explicitly by friends and family, that they were at fault for what happened or that nothing untoward happened. I've talked to a lot of victims of rape and molestation, and one thing I've heard over and over is that they told someone what happened and were told that it was their fault, or they struggled to acknowledge that what had happened to them was wrong.

In the context of the shooter metaphor, it's like being told that the shooting wasn't wrong because you somehow made yourself a target or invited yourself to be shot. That's not a realistic dynamic in that situation, but it's an important one to understand when it comes to recognizing why it might take someone thirty years or more to stand up and say, "This is what this person did to me, and it was not okay".

An Alabaman I work with was asking the "but why are they just coming out now instead of 40 years ago?" and I responded that it is awfully tough to have the courage to come after a powerful person. This is particularly true if you are 16 years old and don't come from a rich or political powerful family. Or as Omar Little would put it "you come at the king, you best not miss".

He didn't seem to get it until I said "it's like folks asking why no one rushed the gunman in a mass shooting. It doesn't work if you're the only one doing it.".

He admitted it was a good point.

Roy Moore is as bad at hiring lawyers and Tump is.

Roy Moore lawyer brings up Ali Velshi’s ‘background’ while defending client from underage sex allegations

In interviews with AL.com, Tina Johnson recalls that in the fall of 1991 she sat in the law office of then-attorney Roy Moore on Third Street in Gadsden. Her mother, Mary Katherine Cofield, sat in the chair next to her. Moore sat behind his desk, across from them. Johnson remembers she was wearing a black and white dress.

Almost from the moment she walked in to Moore's office, Johnson said, Moore began flirting with her.

"He kept commenting on my looks, telling me how pretty I was, how nice I looked," recalled Johnson. "He was saying that my eyes were beautiful."

It made her uncomfortable. "I was thinking, can we hurry up and get out of here?"

Johnson was 28 years old, in a difficult marriage headed toward divorce, and unemployed. She was at the office to sign over custody of her 12-year-old son to her mother, with whom he'd been living. Her mother had hired Moore to handle the custody petition.

Johnson had two young daughters at the time with her then-husband, and her son said he wanted to live with his grandmother.

At one point during the meeting, she said, Moore came around the desk and sat on the front of it, just inches from her. He was so close, she said, she could smell his breath.

According to Johnson, he asked questions about her young daughters, including what color eyes they had and if they were as pretty as she was. She said that made her feel uncomfortable, too.

Once the papers were signed, she and her mother got up to leave. After her mother walked through the door first, she said, Moore came up behind her.

It was at that point, she recalled, he grabbed her buttocks.

"He didn't pinch it; he grabbed it," said Johnson. She was so surprised she didn't say anything. She didn't tell her mother.

Thorp said Moore asked her if she'd go out with him sometime.

"I just kind of said, 'Do you know how old I am?'" she recalled.

"And he said, 'Yeah. I go out with girls your age all the time.'"

Richardson says Moore — now a candidate for U.S. Senate — asked her where she went to school, and then for her phone number, which she says she declined to give, telling him that her father, a Southern Baptist preacher, would never approve.

A few days later, she says, she was in trigonometry class at Gadsden High when she was summoned to the principal’s office over the intercom in her classroom. She had a phone call.

“I said ‘Hello?’” Richardson recalls. “And the male on the other line said, ‘Gena, this is Roy Moore.’ I was like, ‘What?!’ He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m in trig class.’ ”

bnpederson wrote:

I dunno. I mean, local newspapers were doing pretty well in the 80s and 90s and they didn't mention jack shit about Roy Moore at the time.

And national media wasn't too eager, either.

But I'd really like to see what a well-funded local media would do in a post-Weinstein world.

I'd really like to see what a well-funded local media would do in a post-Weinstein world.

You can peg any number of moments in recent history when the objective seemed to change for the members of the religious right, where they swallowed all pride and principle to secure power and vent anger, but for me there is none more glaring than the embrace of Donald Trump.

Trump is clearly not a religious man, unless you believe being compulsively devilish is a form of religiosity. He is mean and surly. He is a bully. He is a pathological liar. He cheats. He is an adulterer. He is twice-divorced with children by three different women. He bragged, on tape, about assaulting women. He says he doesn’t think he has ever asked God for forgiveness.

Trump was a walking, talking rebuke of everything the Christian right had ever told me that it stood for, and yet Republican voters either held their noses or thrust their fists in the air and voted for him anyway.

The anger that gave birth to Trump was a death notice for Republican religious principles. Now, if you ask me what the Republican Party stands for, I’m not sure I can tell you. All I see is regression, wealth worship, nationalism and white supremacy. Maybe that’s it. I no longer see Christ in that equation.

In the wake of all that, we now have the former Alabama Supreme Court judge Roy Moore running for the U.S. Senate as a Republican. Moore has been accused by multiple women in Alabama of having inappropriate sexual contact with them when they were still minors and he was in his 30s, working as a district attorney.

The accusations are serious and not easily dismissed. And yet Moore has denied them, vociferously and unequivocally. Someone here is telling a vicious lie. It’s a he said/she, she, she, she, she said. Not to mention the people interviewed by The New Yorker who say that Moore was banned from a local mall for harassing girls.

What has been most distressing and revelatory is the contortions Moore’s supporters have put themselves in to try to defend him against the allegations.