The Thomas Hearings and the New Gender Wars

It was a national real-life soap opera: 200 million Americans pasted to their television sets, mesmerized by lurid accusations of sexual harassment in high office. Center stage in the Senate caucus room was Prof. Anita Hill, doggedly asserting her claims. Judge Clarence Thomas issued angry denials. Members of the all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee, trying their best to look judicious, postured for the television cameras with self-serving—and meandering—questions. In the middle of it all sat Senator Kennedy, hunched like a puffy, rumpled toad, unable to utter a word lest some vengeful Republican raise his own rather riveting past.

Mercifully, it is over. Justice Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court. Anita Hill is back in Oklahoma. Both will be shadowed by a cloud of suspicion for the rest of their lives.

For me, the hearings roused memories, anger, and lingering dismay. I had memories because I had been there: I sat in the glare of television lights before a Senate committee. I was repeatedly grilled about the minutiae of my life. Those who have not endured nationally publicized questioning about their character have no idea what it is like.

And I was angry. These hearings should have taken place behind closed doors.

Back in September, when Anita Hill first submitted her report of sexual harassment to the FBI, the bureau found the evidence too weak to warrant further action. Its report was distributed to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But some senator (or staffer) ignored the “confidential” classification—and the material mysteriously found its way to the media just in time to delay the Senate vote.

I am well familiar with the dirty-leak tactic: after all, that’s what I went to prison for.

You remember Daniel Elsberg, the antiwar activist who had stolen top-secret government papers and leaked them to the press. President Nixon thought Elsberg threatened national security. He authorized an investigation and told me to discredit him.

So I got hold of derogatory FBI reports about Elsberg and leaked them to the press.

Well, that act gave me the dubious distinction of being the first person in America to go to prison for leaking an FBI report about a person under investigation. But I pleaded guilty after being told by Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski that my conviction would deter such a thing from happening again.

It didn’t. Whoever leaked the FBI report should be prosecuted. And the Senate needs to clean up its act before it loses public confidence altogether.

Feminism Run Amuck

But the damage has been done. The report was leaked; Hill testified publicly; and the Pandora’s box of seething sexual politics, anger, resentment, and manipulation has been opened, spilling its contents all over America.

I reflected on this in an unlikely place. On the Saturday of the Thomas hearings, I was in a California men’s prison. Under California law, there must be no sexual discrimination in hiring guards. Female correctional officers walk the cellblocks freely.

As I walked through the institution, I came upon an embarrassing scene. A young female officer strode into an exposed bathroom area, stood before an inmate seated on the toilet, and ordered him to report to the cellblock.

Prison already strips a person of privacy. Now, because of antidiscrimination laws, inmates suffer the added shame of having the most intimate details of their daily lives invaded by members of the opposite sex.

Just then, across the cellblock, I saw a TV screen showing a sweating Judge Thomas being questioned for allegedly breaking the law by stripping an employee of her dignity through the use of indecent language. Yet here a female guard, by operation of the law, was stripping a naked man of his dignity.

Something was wrong with this picture. One law protects human honor in the workplace; another denigrates it in the prison. And both laws, I realized, are the result of militant feminism, a movement that might have begun with worthy intentions, but soon ran amuck.

Think back to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, propelled largely by feminists who insisted that women could be just as sexually free (read promiscuous) as men and just as explicit in their language (read obscene). The birth-control pill and, eventually, legalized abortion meant that women could be as free as men from the burden of childbearing, and more able to compete in the workplace.

Unlike European feminists, who fought for women’s rights but acknowledged gender differences, feminists in the U.S. took the tack that men and women were identical beings with different body types. Anyone who said that men and women were different was trounced as a chauvinist pig.

Malignant Fruit

Today I believe we are reaping the fruit of 25 years of militant feminism. In the Thomas hearings, we saw the same women’s groups who once proclaimed a woman’s freedom to use explicit sexual language now righteously indignant in their claims that Clarence Thomas had allegedly talked that way to a woman. The very people who once defended a woman’s right to like pornography are now outraged if a man is vulgar enough to talk about such things to a woman. The very people who deliberately tore down older codes of chivalry and deference to women now want the protection they offer.

The fundamental pillar of our society, the family, has been under assault for years, and its crumbling has long been of vital concern to Christians. But do not miss the progression. The artillery salvos are escalating against something even more fundamental: the very notion of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman.

If the Thomas hearings sensitized America to the very real wrong of sexual harassment, that would be a great thing. But I believe they have set in motion a tidal wave of confusion, anger, and resentment that will result in all-out gender wars. It is a consequence of the militant feminists’ effort to assert human dignity without acknowledging its Source. After all, God is not the author of confusion. It seems to me that the Thomas hearings revealed a more diabolical source at work.

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.

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