Locker room banter. Locker room banter. Locker room banter.
If it’s repeated enough, people might accept it. That’s all it was: locker room banter. Right? Harmless locker room banter. That’s what Trump and his Cheeto Jesus worshippers want you to believe.
So should we accept it? Was it just excusable, harmless boys-will-be-boys “locker room banter”? Hell the fuck no. And here’s why.
Donald Trump was 59 years old when he said this filthy misogynist pig shit. FIFTY-NINE YEARS OLD. He’s 70 now. This was 11 years ago. Think about that. Locker room banter of this nature (though, still, unacceptable), by definition, involves middle school boys, high school boys and, sadly, even some college men. Stupid boys and young men who don’t know any better, but who absolutely SHOULD know better. I was certainly guilty of this in my youth. At a minimum, I definitely tolerated it among boyhood friends. But by the time I was in my 20s, I knew better. And in my 30s, I regretted ever engaging in that type of “locker room banter.” By then, I had become a working man who had married a strong woman and had two young daughters, and I was representing women who’d been sexually harassed in the workplace. My “locker room banter” days were a distant memory.
I’m over a decade away from being 59 years old, the age of Donald Trump when he bragged about sexually assaulting women and “grabbing them by the pussy.” But at my ripe age of 48, I’ve known for a long time, decades, that you don’t say shit like that, even behind closed doors. It’s not remotely funny. You don’t call women dogs, pigs or slobs. You don’t demean them. You don’t speak down them. And you don’t ever, ever body shame them. Too many teenage girls are cutting themselves today over their self-perceived looks and lack of self-esteem. It’s one of the saddest and most tragic things happening in our country. Fact: every parent of a teenage daughter either has first-hand experience or knows a family who has a struggling daughter. Some of us even know of girls who’ve taken their lives.
Donald Trump is now 70 years old and running for president of the United States. As a Trump supporter, maybe you could convince yourself that it’s unfair to criticize him for what he said 11 years ago. Fine. But this is the same man who recently described an opposing female presidential candidate’s “face” in a presidential primary as a disqualifying factor. A man who recently stated that a respected female reporter was on the rag when she asked him tough questions in a debate. Who recently compared his wife’s looks to a primary opponent’s wife’s looks and who even posted an unflattering picture of that opponent’s wife.
This is a man who talks about his own daughter as a sex object. A presidential candidate, who, just last week, a month before the election, tweeted about the weight of a former beauty pageant winner and who falsely slut-shamed her in a 3:00 a.m. tweet-storm. Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with him?
Trump is obviously unpopular among women. That goes without saying. But women aside, why would any man, especially one with an elementary, middle, or high school daughter or granddaughter, support this fucking creep? He is a misogynist pig of the worst kind. What would it say to our girls and young women if he was the leader, the face, of our country? The message would be clear and unmistakable to them.
Hillary Clinton is a flawed candidate. She’s not perfect. Like most humans, she’s made mistakes. But she is undeniably qualified, capable and competent. Like her or not, she’s an intelligent woman who knows the issues and knows them well.
Her thin-orange-skinned opponent has set a very low bar in this election season. It’s one that Hillary Clinton easily hurdles. Unlike him, she’s never hurled racist insults and labels about immigrants. She’s never proposed to ban an entire religion of 1.5 billion people from entering our country. She’s never suggested setting up a federal deportation force to forcibly remove 11 million people. She hasn’t insulted any respected American-born federal judges based on their “Mexican” heritage.
She hasn’t waged any verbal wars against any Gold Star Moms, insulted any “captured” war heroes, peddled in any National Enquirer (Kennedy assassination) conspiracy theories about her political opponents, claimed she knew more than “the generals” about ISIS, threatened to disband NATO, praised foreign dictators, promoted the use of nukes or torture, physically mocked any disabled reporters, or spearheaded any racist “birther” conspiracies about our nation’s first black president.
She’s just running a relatively normal presidential campaign, and she’s about to become our nation’s first female president. I didn’t support her in the primary. I’m still not happy about some of her positions and past votes. I will keep a watchful eye on her. We all should. But I know for a fact that she will select good Supreme Court justices. And I know that the reverberations of her presidency will not be inconsequential to our nation’s young girls and young women. And, finally, I know she’ll make an exponentially better United States president than Donald Trump.
― Peace out
Before You Go
