Clarence Thomas lied about sexually harassing women, in my opinion. Back in 1991 he accused the all-white members of the Senate Judiciary Committee of a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks” when they questioned his behavior.
His reward for playing the race card was a lifetime job on the U.S. Supreme Court.
I think Anita Hill told the truth about Thomas sexually harassing her for years in very disgusting ways and telling her to keep quiet about it.
Her reward for playing the “sexism card” was relentless grilling by some members of the all-male Judiciary Committee and being characterized as a schemer, a vixen, a liar and a tramp.Nineteen years have passed, but some of the images from that hearing are indelible: Arlen Specter’s incredibly smug and officious questioning of Hill in which he accused her of perjury.
He did not shake her, however. All he accomplished was to make millions of Americans happy they had never become lawyers. (If Specter wonders why, having tried both the Republican and Democratic parties, he will soon be out of a job, it may be in part because many women and not a few men remember his treatment of Hill.)
I remember her parents, who sat silently behind her in the Senate Caucus Room hour after hour. They were elderly, they were dignified. They had spent their entire lives tilling the soil of rural Oklahoma.
And now they had to sit in the glare of TV lights and hear their daughter forced to say the words “penis” and “pubic hair” and “oral sex” and “Long Dong Silver.”
It became a national soap opera and one that featured soft-core porn.
<snip>
But Hill, hardly a radical - - she was a law professor at Oral Roberts University, one of the most conservative institutions in the land - - did succeed in bringing sexual harassment out of the closet and making it an important national issue.
Time and time again, senators like Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) said they could not understand how a woman who was the victim of sexual harassment could stay in her job and even accept dinners and professional favors from her harasser. (Having written several columns on battered women, I was reminded of those men who could not believe that a truly battered woman could remain in the same house as her attacker.)
These senators could not understand Hill’s behavior because these senators had never felt weak. They had never felt fear. They had never felt anything but being utterly in charge. Men of power, they were blind to those without power.Click on the link to read who, in the writer's opinion won in the recent interaction of the two women involved, and why.
Worth the click to read the decisive end.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/43992.html
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