Author Caitlin Flanagan has always been a maverick not afraid of shewering the feminist elite, and now she is doing it again with a piece in Time magazine headlined "Why this Democrat Won't Vote for Hillary Clinton."
Flanagan is a self-described feminist who "burned with indignation" against Justice Clarence Thomas over Anita Hill allegations. She was deeply affected whenever a woman came forward to report that she had been raped.
"I was excited about Bill Clinton’s campaign, and I voted for him," she recalls.
Flanagan was not concerned about Gennifer Flowers, who claimed to have been Clinton's mistress, regarding the consensual sex lives of politicians as of no more relevance than that of dentists.
But then along came Paula Jones with a very different kind of story, a nasty one of workplace sexual harassment. And Flannagan believed her.
Of course, she was immediately told by her feminist friends that she was foolish:
If a man’s politics—not his personal behavior, his politics—were deemed to be pro-woman, his accuser would be subject to doubt, and to forensic levels of investigation and titanic public ridicule—even from other women. It turned out that if you dragged a $20 bill through a trailer park, a bunch of lying sluts would show up to grab it.
Oh.
I voted for Clinton again. Because I was starting to become a little less naive. And because the stock market was rocking, and because when I had a C-section, my insurance paid for four days in the hospital instead of two, which was a special gift to me from Bill Clinton. He was always good with women that way—he knew how to reach into the most intimate moments of a female voter’s life and make her grateful to him. Bill had dragged a four-night hospital stay through a nice neighborhood in Santa Monica, and I had darted out of my duplex apartment to grab it.
Then came Juanita Broaddrick, who alleged that Bill Clinton had raped her, came a long and Flanagan's reaction was "visceral."
But by then, I had learned to doubt. By then I had learned to ask questions I never had asked about rape victims before. Why had she waited so long to tell the story publicly? Why had she chosen that particular moment? Why did small details not add up? What did she stand to gain from telling it?
The Clinton machine taught me to ask those questions of rape victims.
What did Hillary know, and when did she know it? She must have known a lot, and she must have known it early on. She knew that the kind of women who vote for Democrats care about three or four huge issues—abortion above all—and that if you stay on the right side of those three or four issues, much will be forgiven, or overlooked, or disbelieved. In short, Hillary understood politics, at its most base and distasteful level.
. . .
As Democrats, as women, we must ask ourselves: Do we stand with the women who report sexual assault—all women: big-haired, “slutty,” trailer-park, all of them—or do we stand, once again, with the Clinton machine and its Arkansas droit du seigneur?
When I was young, my father told me what his father told him: If I got in the voting booth and so much as reached for the Republican lever, the hand of God would come into that voting booth and strike me dead.
I’m not taking any chances.
But I won’t vote for a candidate who helped “destroy” the credibility of women who came forward to report that they had been preyed upon sexually by a powerful man. This year, for the first time in my voting life, I’m staying home.
I firmly believe in due process for those who are accused of rape, and I'd love to ask Flanagan, whose writing I admire, to talk about the erosion of thse rights on campus.
On the hypocrisy, cruelty, and doit de seigneur issues, however, we are in complete agreement.