I recently sat through Sexual Harassment Prevention training. Not because of anything I’ve done, mind you, but because organizations have long realized that if training isn’t mandated, lawyers are ready to pounce when someone does do something illegal. I first started taking these trainings at Nashotah House and I’ve had them just about everywhere I’ve worked since then. Even so I sometimes see people who just don’t “get it,” even after training. Workplace harassment is, unfortunately, something we do need to be concerned about. I couldn’t help but think, however, while sitting in the training—does having a Commander in Chief with a history of sexual harassment make all of this merely academic? Sexual harassment is against the law, but the one who swears to uphold this law with an oath on the Bible breaks that very law. There are very deep implications here.
It might’ve been a different story if all of this weren’t known before going into the election, but it was. In the twenty-first century, who in good conscience could vote for a man on the record as a sexual harasser? In many situations you’d lose your job for less. In this case masses of hate-filled rhetoric topped common sense: don’t do as I say, don’t do as I do. I want to be your leader. This cultural schizophrenia takes its toll on our family values. Where all people are not treated equally there are no human values. I’m sitting in this training room being told of court case after court case where companies dismissed individuals for doing something the leader of the free world just doesn’t see as wrong.
How little it takes to undo the progress of centuries. I suppose that’s what we might expect when a bunch of educated people put democracy in place for a nation that prides itself on being anti-intellectual. Perhaps this was inevitable. We’ve become a nation where we have to try to lead our leadership. Politicians long out of touch with the quotidian training in the pedestrian lives of the masses. We know—and hopefully knew before we attended that seminar—that all people have a right not to be harassed based on gender or any other immutable characteristic. Instead we’ve become a nation where “President” is supposed to be a protected category and where, outside a very small Oval Office, the rest of the country is left to fend for itself.
