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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: j_b who wrote (5157)	9/24/1998 11:56:00 AM
From: dougjn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Yes, I remember Towers, and I remember thinking the womanizing charge sounded like partisan muckraking being advanced for other reasons. Now I can't say I cared a lot about Towers so I didn't think about it too much, but it did seem to me to be probably unfair. I remember wondering if people were talking about really ugly behavior, or was it more a partisan slam that was easy at the time, so close to the Anita Hill uproar. The boozing seemed to amount to serious alcoholism, which didn't seem ideal in a Defense Secretary. As in relevant to his job performance. On another point you raised - The idea that sexual relations between someone higher and someone lower in an organization just might, almost or entirely automatically, constitute sexual harassment is quite fantastic. Let's all step back a moment and take a deep breath. Wouldn't that be a quite horrible infringement of individual liberties? I thought this was supposed to be the land of the free? We're not free to date who we want, if both parties fully agree? What sort of liberty is that? We don't guard against rape by requiring all women to wear a chodor and cover every inch of their bodies in public except for their eyes. We shouldn't guard against coercive pressure to have sex (sexual harassment) by making it illegal for people working in the same organization to be intimate. Let's get a grip. Let's balance our values a bit. That pendulum has swung way too far in the sex police direction. Let's swing it back a bit. I think it should be made illegal for any company to adopt internal rules so broad and infringing of individual liberties as to prevent all dating between co-workers. (To my knowledge very few companies do. Many require disclosing a relationship in any situation where one party has any input in the evaluation of another party. And then perhaps require that that person remove himself/herself from having input. That sort of thing is perfectly reasonable, seems to me.) Doug