San Diego Mayor Bob Filner
Each day brings new and stunning justifications for outrageous and/or despicable behavior. And we haven’t even gotten to Anthony Weiner yet – the gift that keeps on giving to media pundits, late-night talk show hosts, and self-righteously pompous fellow politicians.
Yesterday we had Ariel Castro, the current candidate for Most Loathsome Man in America, who chalked up the 937 charges to which he pleaded guilty to an addiction to pornography, no different from an addiction to alcohol. And anyway, it wasn’t so bad. The three women he kept captive for more than a decade enjoyed being with him; they were one happy family. He never beat them, all of the sex was consensual, and the chains. . .? Well, they must have just been decorative.
And now comes San Diego Mayor Bob Filner. He’s another piece of work.
Mayor Filner, you may recall, has been in the hot seat lately amidst a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by his former spokesperson, Irene McCormack Jackson, and seven other women’s complaints of “crude and disgusting” comments and inappropriate touching by the 70-year-old mayor and former congressman.
Unfortunately, sexual misbehavior by men on the upside of power transactions is not exactly rare. But here’s the best part: Hizzoner acknowledges, “I’m clearly doing something wrong.” But he has an excuse.
He was never given sexual harassment training by the city of San Diego.
Now, we could make jokes about this (and we obviously will), saying the man evidently needed no training and picked up sexual harassment fine on his own. But seriously: What?!!!!
“If there is any liability at all, the city will almost certainly be liable for ‘failing to prevent harassment,'” Filner’s attorney Harvey Berger wrote to city attorney Jan Goldsmith.
Yes, training in what constitutes sexual harassment is valuable and should be given across the employment horizon. But someone like Filner, who has been in leadership positions for decades, should be able to figure out on his own that you can’t touch, grab or demean women, and that they don’t enjoy it. What’s missing here? It isn’t training.
He has agreed to a two-week leave of absence during which he will get “intensive counseling.” To think that two weeks of therapy, no matter how intensive, is going to take care of a problem so severe that he would have needed training to know that what he was doing was wrong, is ludicrous.
You know what? Whether he received sexual harassment training or not, this guy is bad news, even worse for not manning up and taking responsibility for his actions.
To quote Oliver Cromwell’s exhortation to the “Rump Parliament” in 1653: “You have been sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”
It’s not that they don’t know right from wrong, they use lack of training as an excuse to justify their behavior when they get caught hoping for sympathy or a lighter sentence. Any person with an ounce of morals knows that certain behaviors are unexceptable in society.
There does seem to be an attempt by some to see how far they can stretch outside the boundries of common sense and to see how many people they can get to go along with them.
I don’t see things getting any better until people stop trying to always be so politically correct and stop worrying that pointing out a wrong behavior might offend someone. Truth sometimes hurts, But right is right and wrong is wrong, sin is sin, and if that ever changes we are headed down a slippery slope to destruction.
How far would some be willing to go?
http://zionica.com/2013/08/01/msnbc-host-says-newborn-infants-dont-count-as-alive-unless-parents-decide-they-do/
This is all so disappointing to me. I am a Catholic and have not been to church for some time but even aside from the religious respect for women I can say this.
Any civilization is always judged by the level of it’s womanhood. That is to say the nobler a woman is the more noble man will have to be to be deserving of her love, that is why the level of any civilization is always judged by the level of it’s womanhood. So therefore, the men who think women are objects for their sexual desires are bringing the whole of our nation down to the level of say Russian society. The Army and now the bussiness district of America have much to be ashamed of. I think women are the most valuable posession we have and their discomfort should be carefully investigated. This man here is one who has this delusion that the world owes him something and he works everyday under the impression he deserves what he covets. I am tired of these men and if those is charge of justice now fail than for now I have to watch them, but when it is my turn to file charges on crime. Particularly sexual violence and homicides, no one will get a free ride. No more is what I call it, my no more policy, and it seeks to give the jury a reason to sentence death when able, and I will always have a book of those criminals I put in prison. I will show up at every parole hearing and they will never get it.
Women I solute you, not as once my superior now my equal. But as the women who do not fail, the first to have been present on Good Friday. That means your the first to be present on Easter Sunday. If your upset you have a reason to be and this is just one more.
Yes, he should know by now how not to sexually harass women. Some of it is his age and his generation, which is just a generation older than me, so I know them well. It becomes part of their personalities. I was in an industry (music) where sexual harassment was all part of the exchange, almost like hazing. Since I am mouthy and can think and talk at the same time, I fought fire with fire and came out okay, but I watched meeker women cower at it and that made me feel bad I was able to give as good as I got back at the idiots because it only justifies their behavior. I can think of a few characters I’ve worked with over the years that couldn’t change if they had to. And if they did, they wouldn’t have any game, which is that it is, in their minds. I got so used to mouthing back at those guys that once out of that business, I had to read the manual myself and learn to STFU so I didn’t provoke anyone.
By the way, my best comeback, which had to be delivered dead-pan, was “You wouldn’t like it.”
Why watch the women you worked with take abuse?
I came from a generation when there was nothing you could do about it if you were a woman but leave or cut them down with some amount of humor. I’m very glad things have changed. There was no recourse then. I remember once at the office, there was some electrician working there at the corporate office up on a ladder I had to walk by and he was just awful and lacivious and since he was not within the company, I said something thinking someone would tell him to keep his mouth shut, but no one did. This was all pre-Anita Hill. I cried watching Hill’s hearing. It was such a long time coming. Sadly, she was not successful because of political pandering, but the result was companies began making rules about sexual harassment ever since then, so she changed the workplace.