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No, Eva Murry’s Icky Story About Joe Biden Doesn’t Make Tara Reade’s Accusation More Credible [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Cool your jets, conservative media.

Two days ago, Law and Crime, usually a partisan website on the Democratic side, posted the detailed allegation of Eva Murry, a 26-year-old woman who is engaged and has two children. The site treated it as a major scoop (“A woman says she was sexually harassed by presumptive Democratic Party Presidential nominee Joe Biden when she was 14 years old”) and the conservative news media picked up the ball and ran for the metaphorical goal-line. Fox News wrote, “A woman related to a former Republican Senate candidate is accusing former Vice President Joe Biden of sexual harassment…The claim comes as Biden is denying a separate allegation made by former staffer Tara Reade that he sexually assaulted her in 1993.” Further down the food chain—much further— the Trump-boosting blog WS sported the headline, “Report: Another Biden Accuser Comes Forward, Says He Sexually Harassed Her When She Was Only 14-Years-Old,” and began, “Yet another Biden accuser has come forward with a disgusting story of sexual harassment.”

Eva Murry’s account has absolutely no relevance to Tara Reade’s allegations of sexual assault. None. It should not be treated as if it does.

In an earlier post, I listed the three reasons why I am dubious of Reade’s accusation. The first is that she took so long to make her accusation public, a problem she shares with Dr. Blasey Ford and Anita Hill, among others. Second, the accusation looks and feels like a politically-motivated attack, another feature redolent of Hill and Ford. Third, such accusations are always suspect when they are alone.

It’s still alone. Murry’s story is the kind of “this guy is a creep” tale that came from all sides at Donald Trump during the Presidential campaign. We know Biden is a creep, or should; it doesn’t provide any reason to believe he is capable of sexual assault no matter how hard his adversaries try to spin it. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 10/26/2017: Witch Hunts, A Missing Witch Message, A Too-Gleeful Dodger, Racially Offensive Breakfast Cereal…[UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 67 Comments

Good Morning!

1 Sigh. Driving home from Maryland via the Capital Beltway for the first time in many years, I saw the white and gold spires of the D. C. Mormon Temple (above), a local landmark, rising in the distance, and remembered that an an upcoming overpass had long been famous for the inspired bit of graffiti scrawled on it decades ago, perfectly placed to compliment the fantastic structure. It read “SURRENDER DOROTHY!,” in script, for decades.  I don’t know when it was painted over, but it’s gone now.

Why would they do that? It was a part of area lore, it was clever, and it was always good for a smile. Some humorless bureaucrat decided to make the world a little less fun for no good reason. Of such small, heartless gestures is life drained of joy, drop by drop.

2.  Last night, in the 11th inning of a memorable, back and forth World Series Game Two between the Astros and the Dodgers,  Charlie Culberson of Los Angeles hit a two out home run to narrow the score from 7-5 Astros to 7-6. Nonetheless, Culberson’s team was one out away from losing a game they appeared to have in the bag when they were leading 3-1 in the 9th. (Indeed, the Dodgers did lose after the next batter struck out.) Despite his team’s plight, Culberson celebrated his home run like he had just won the game, or at least tied it. He screamed, he raised his hands, he high-fived everyone in sight. Joe Buck on the Fox broadcast speculated that Culberson might have had the score wrong, and believed that his home run tied the game.

No, said Culberson. He knew the score. “I never would have imagined hitting a home run in the World Series, and I did that. I pointed to my parents in the stands and pointing to my wife,” Culberson explained. “I was just having fun out there, nothing more than that.”

Except you’re not supposed to be having fun when your team is facing a devastating loss, Joe. That was bad form, bad taste, selfish, and obnoxious. The Fox cameras even caught a Dodger coach in the dugout turning around, disgusted , and saying to the still ebullient Culberson, “Come on!”

3. 

That’s Ellen Degeneris ogling Katy Perry’s breasts.  Ellen is gay, as we all know. Explain to me why this conduct is funny, acceptable and harmless, but a male heterosexual behaving similarly, for exactly the same reason, would be sexual harassment. You have 30 seconds…

Time! What’s your answer!

Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Now THAT Was A Rape Culture…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Blogger and esteemed commenter here Rick Jones shares my passion for theater and is also, like me, a stage director, but seldom has a chance to weigh in on that topic. My post about the troubling lyrics in “Standing on the Corner,” the best known song in Frank Loesser’s “The Most Happy Fella” gave Rick a chance to swing at a pitch in his wheelhouse, as the baseball broadcasters like to say, and he didn’t disappoint.

I want to clarify something from the original post. Having noted the lyrics, I was no way  criticizing them or the song, or the musical itself. Older shows are valuable and fascinating in part because they serve as windows on past cultural values and attitudes—that was one of the reasons for the ambitious, important and doomed mission of the theater I have been artistic director of for the last two decades. Such politically incorrect references should never be excised in performance.

“The Most Happy Fella” is a slog, however. Ambitious, sure, but too long, too sentimental, and with too many unavoidable “wince points,” as I call them, to make the show worth the huge investment in talent, money and time that it takes to produce competently. Any time the best songs in a musical are the ones that have nothing to do with the plot (“Standing on the Corner,” “Big D,” and “Abondanza!”, which in in the clip above) it’s ominous. The 1925 Pulitzer Prize-winning hit play this pseudo-opera was based on, “They Knew What They Wanted” by Sydney Howard, is much better.

Here is Rick’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Now That Was A Rape Culture…”: Continue reading →

Now THAT Was A Rape Culture…

/ Jack Marshall / 65 Comments

I just happened to be surfing past the  Broadway Channel on Sirius XM, and found myself startled at the tone of the lyrics of that Hit Parade smash from the 1956 musical, “The Most Happy Fella,” by the great composer/lyricist Frank Loesser, “Standing on the Corner (Watching All The Girls Go By)”—especially at the end:

Saturday, and I’m so broke
Haven’t got a girl, and that’s no joke
Still I’m living like a millionaire
When I take me down to Main Street and I review the harem parading for me there..

Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by
Standing on the corner underneath the springtime sky!

Brother, you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking
Or for the “Woo!” look in your eye
You’re only standing on the corner watching all the girls
Watching all the girls, watching all the girls
Go by!

Nobody saw anything wrong with these sentiments in 1956. It was fun, it was cute, it was innocent! A bunch of guys hanging out, leering and ogling women as they walked on the sidewalk, with “woo”—that is, lust— in their eyes and illegal thoughts in their brains, and periodically wolf-whistling at “the harem.”

Sometimes we forget—sometimes women especially forget—that our culture’s ethics regarding sexual etiquette and respect does advance, and has, as much as self-serving activists would have us believe otherwise.

 

Cleavage Ettiquette

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

"FOCUS!"

The husband of the President of Finland is being widely ridiculed in the news media after being caught by a journalist’s camera as he plainly ogled the cleavage of  Princess Mary of Denmark and was seemingly caught in the act by the Princess as well. Unfair. He allowed his gaze to linger a bit long, perhaps, and one’s manners are supposed to be somewhat elevated, theoretically, in the presence of royalty, but Pentti Arajarvi was mostly a victim of the sad reality that being discrete, once the primary etiquette requirement of men relentlessly drawn to a woman’s comely assets, is no longer possible in public and often in private as well. President Obama, you will recall, was caught doing a classic male turnaround to catch the spectacle of a perfect female butt passing by.

Even more unfair, and ridiculous, are the opportunistic women’s rights warriors who use such incidents to show how women are still treated as sex objects by men in the workplace and elsewhere. Continue reading →

Shameless Oglers, Ethics Chess, and the Duty to Confront

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Men who openly ogle the body parts of women in public make me want to turn in my Man Card and start dating Chaz Bono. I don’t know how people get like that, but no male should survive into his twenties with the idea that it is socially acceptable to stare at a woman’s breasts, legs, derriere or comely visage without an express invitation—and yes, some clothing choices can constitute such invitations. Absent that, however, a woman has the right not to be made to feel like a pole dancer, meat on the hoof, or a Sports illustrated swimsuit model simply because she is in public and in the presence of Y chromosomes.

The great relationship advice columnist Carolyn Hax addresses herself today to the lament of a woman who found herself unable to muster a response to a man in a restaurant who continued to stare at her chest, ruining her dinner. Hax initially disappointed me by suggesting that the woman should have simply switched seats, removing the attractive nuisance from his view. But she redeemed herself as she went on to urge the woman to prepare for her future encounters with ogling pigs, since given her natural endowments these were likely to occur:

“Learn to perform under duress through preparation.Ask yourself, now, what you can realistically hope to do in these situations, then prepare the words, gestures and/or actions. Say your plans out loud in the shower (seriously); repeat them to your friends by telling them the restaurant story and spelling out what you wish you had done. Even when practicing feels stupid, use repetition to teach your brain where the path is. In time, you’ll be able to find it no matter how rattled you get.”

This is what I like to call “ethics chess;” preparing yourself to handle ethical problems and dilemmas when they arise…thinking ahead regarding your tactics when a predictable event occurs, so you do the responsible and ethical thing. Continue reading →