OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: The moral high ground

Al Franken called it irony, but it was so much more.

The comedian Democratic senator from Minnesota announced that he would soon resign from the U.S. Senate because of allegations of improper sexual behavior toward women. But Donald Trump got elected president and remains in office despite a greater number of those very kinds of allegations.

Meantime, Judge Roy Moore proceeds to likely victory Tuesday in a special U.S. Senate race in Alabama while he faces multiple allegations of seeking to romance young girls while a much-older man.

Franken's fate is less a matter of irony than of raw calculations of math and cynical ones of politics.

And his fate is a sacrifice to an important cause, indeed a transcendent one. It's the cause of women's newly emerged empowerment to confront, resist and defeat men who use their leveraged positions of business, politics and celebrity--of economic intimidation, generally--to cheapen them with sexual harassment and assault against which they previously felt helpless.

Franken is not being treated equitably in his political disposition as compared to that of Trump and, likely, Moore. He's not being treated fairly under the rule of criminal evidence, which is that one is innocent until proven guilty. But he is being treated appropriately in the context of the great enraged uprising of American women in 2017.

Yes, it's ironic, all right. Trump is the cause of the war. Franken is the early casualty.

And, yes, this is war--political, cultural and of gender. Franken is not the first person to take a bullet in war for which some other soldier would have been more deserving.

You know what they say: All is fair in war and gender.

The raw mathematical calculation, particularly for Democratic women senators who insisted that Franken had to go, was that the number eight is entirely too high for accusations of uninvited pawing or blindsided lip and tongue assault.

One accusation accompanied by a photograph you could argue about--Democratic senators, both women and men, could fade that heat and refer the matter to a time-buying, face-saving ethics inquiry.

But three more just the other day, bringing the total to eight ... was New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand referring to those eight in saying "enough is enough," or was she referring generally to the kind of behavior repeatedly alleged?

I'd suspect "yes" would be the right answer to that question.

It's true that none of the eight allegations is proven. But here's the cynical political calculation: None of the accusations against Trump is proven, either. Nor do we have empirical judgments against Moore on what has been alleged of him.

But Democrats are the modern party of--and they desire and need to remain the party of--the transcendent cause of women's progressivism.

So, Democrats require a moral high ground to assail Republicans for tolerating Trump and electing Moore. And they can't stand credibly on that moral high ground if they tolerate Franken as he keeps getting accused--merely accused--of grabbing the posteriors of women wanting to have their pictures taken with him.

So, he had to go--conveniently, it turned out, because of another cynical political calculation. Democrats could easily sacrifice Franken because Minnesota has a Democratic governor who'll replace him with another reliable Democratic senator.

A Republican governor of Minnesota might have had Democrats behaving as morally bankrupt toward Franken as Alabamians likely will vote Tuesday for Moore. Raw political partisanship is the root of much moral bankruptcy.

It will be interesting to see if Franken remains popular on the speaking circuit and is restored to prominence in show business. I suspect it will come down to how people balance the images--one as an unfair sacrifice and the other a creepy masher.

I predict the sacrifice will prevail, particularly if Franken remains penitent while Trump remains arrogantly defiant and Moore creepy.

Likewise, voters in Alabama likely will be explaining Wednesday morning that they elected Moore not because he was personally deserving, but because of ... you guessed it--raw calculations of math, cynical ones of politics, and a transcendent cause.

The raw math and cynical politics are that one dirty vote for one creepy sinner was essential for the transcendent cause of trying to save the lives of unborn babies and resist the supposed abomination of what these fundamentalist and evangelical Alabamians call a perverted gay lifestyle.

Alas, this is our life and time, a seismic one.

We'll come out on the other side reformed in our male-female relations and evolved in our prevailing thinking on sexual orientation.

But the indefinite meantime will be a ride that will be raw, cynical, unfair, rough.

Someday we'll build monuments on these battlefields. And then, on some later day, we'll argue about the appropriateness of those monuments, both the one to Al Franken and the one to the me-too hashtag.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 12/10/2017

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