Author Archives: SHG

Prosecute, Smear, Acquit

Not everyone is aware that the #MeToo “movement” didn’t arise organically. I had been told it was coming well before it happened, that there was a deliberate plan to circumvent the difficulties presented by the legal system, even the Title IX campus sex tribunals, because they required two things that proponents found too hard to address: Evidence and the possibility that their accusations might be tested.

When it started “happening,” meaning that it wasn’t just some crazy conspiracy theory but had metastasized into reality, I wrote about it. For the sake of time frame, this was before Alyssa Milano grabbed onto Tarana Burke’s 2006 coinage of Me Too. This wasn’t an accident, but a decision to elevate unproven accusation into indisputable “truth.” It was a decision that the cost of the “few” false accusations and ruination of innocents was unfortunate, but necessary, collateral damage. Continue reading →

Was The Equal Rights Amendment Ratified?

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring offered a curious quote upon his state’s ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, a mere 48 years after Congress enacted it and sent it into the wild for the states to do as they will.

For nearly 150 years, the Constitution did not acknowledge the existence of women. Now, 231 years since our country was founded and on the centennial anniversary of the nineteenth amendment, the American people have shown that they are as committed as ever to true equality by adopting the Equal Rights Amendment.

If the American people are committed to “true equality,” then the ERA wouldn’t be needed any more than a constitutional amendment is needed to give us a right to breathe air. But for a guy giving elapsed years, Herring missed the one that matters here, and Congress included in its preamble to the 28th Amendment that it had to be ratified within seven years, subsequently extended for an additional three years before the initial deadline elapsed. Continue reading →

Weinstein: A Walker Too Far

When the nightly news showed the B-roll of Harvey Weinstein entering 100 Centre Street for trial, I cringed. There he was, enfeebled.

Maybe this once-robust man, whether sex-hound or rapist, needed to use the walker. It was said that back surgery required it. That could well be true. But it emitted the odor of trying way too hard to create an impression of a old, decrepit guy, too harmless to commit the crime with which he was charged, too pathetic to not evoke the sympathy of the jury. Continue reading →

Canceling American Dirt

The buzz was huge.Until the backlash.

“American Dirt,” a novel by Jeanine Cummins about a Mexican woman and her son fleeing to the United States to escape cartel violence, came out last week and seemed poised to become one of the year’s biggest books. It made its debut at No. 1 on The New York Times’s best-seller list for hardcover and for combined print and e-book fiction this week. But the book has also encountered a backlash, with Latinx writers and community members criticizing Cummins’s depiction of the migrant experience and accusing her of appropriating it for profit.

To be fair, the New York Times can’t help itself from using “Latinx,” since they hope to turn the 2% of Hispanics that favor the word into subscribers when they get out of college and pay off their student loans, or Bernie gets elected president, whichever comes first. Continue reading →

When The Dictionary Is Broke

With some regularity, someone writes about cute popular words and phrases that are played out. Some are trite. Some are memes. Some just outlived their useful lifespan. Some people will disagree, and words, being words, will either continue to be used or not, because they don’t like being told what to do. But what about the dictionary (forgive the personification, for a moment) telling us what words we’re allowed to use?

We all misspeak or misuse words sometimes. Maybe we’ve latched onto phrases our parents handed down incorrectly. Or perhaps we picked them up from a movie, television, or social media with no clue they were being used inappropriately—or even worse, offensively.

It’s OK; most of us unknowingly use problematic words and phrases from time to time without thinking about their origins or how they could hurt some groups of people. What’s not OK is to keep doing it once you know it’s wrong.

Continue reading →

Their Sledgehammer, Their Truth

Aside from the current dalliance into anti-Trumpism, there is nothing the media cares more about than itself. That would be entirely understandable at P.J. Clarke’s after a hard day’s reporting, but this isn’t about the ordinary griping about how hard they have it or how unfair it is they aren’t loved and appreciated, and since many don’t actually “go” to work anymore, and wouldn’t know P.J. Clarke’s if they tripped on it.

This is about using the unique tool of the media to express their self-adoration and obsession, and in the process of doing so, say the words out loud that we believe to be the case but usually can’t prove. In defending his colleague, Felicia Sonmez, Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle did it. He said it out loud.

Sonmez kept both eyes on the truth — or more precisely, on one particular truth, namely that somewhere a woman was experiencing this outpouring of adulation for a man who choked and lacerated her during an encounter that she called a rape, and which he acknowledged was very much like one.

Continue reading →

Kaiman and Kobe

The name “Sonmez” really didn’t mean much to me, so when the shitstorm over Felicia Sonmez’s compulsion to twit about an unproved rape allegation upon learning of Kobe Bryant’s death, I didn’t connect the dots. Now I know, and it makes a difference. This is the same person who “canceled,” as the popular word goes, or destroyed the life of, as I prefer to describe it, Jon Kaiman.

Kaiman’s name may not be much more of a household name than Sonmez’s, and that may well be why someone like Sonmez could so easily ruin his life. As Emily Yoffe put it:

Journalist Jonathan Kaiman is one of the least famous, least powerful men to be brought down by the #MeToo movement.

Continue reading →

The Weird Status of Weed

Is marijuana legal? Decriminalized? Still a schedule 1 drug while shops selling edibles open their doors and farms run by Big Agra grow tons of it? In Austin, Texas, the city council decided to make some changes.

The day after the Austin City Council approved a resolution to stop arresting or ticketing people for most low-level marijuana possession offenses, the police chief made clear he had no plans to do so.

“[Marijuana] is still illegal, and we will still enforce marijuana law if we come across people smoking in the community,” Chief Brian Manley said during a news conference Friday afternoon.

How could this be? Things are changing, but not necessarily in a consistent or coherent way. Continue reading →