The Soft-Porn Soap Opera

Clarence Thomas lied about sexually harassing women, in my opinion. But 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.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., characterized it a different way during a recess. "This is warfare," he said.

Thomas won, though by a very thin margin. The Judiciary Committee voted 7-7 to send his nomination to the full Senate without a recommendation, and the Senate voted 52-48 to confirm him.

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.

Thomas was outraged that Hill had been allowed to make accusations about him. And he complained "that unless you kowtow to an old order, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."

Which is pretty strong stuff from a guy who ended up with a cushy job for which he was minimally qualified.

Today, Hill is a professor at Brandeis University. A couple of weeks ago, she got a voice mail from Clarence Thomas' wife, Ginni, who heads a right-wing organization that receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in anonymous contributions.

The voice mail said in part, "I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband." She concluded, "OK, have a good day."

Have a good day? Through her publicist, Ginni Thomas later released a statement describing the phone message as an "olive branch." Hill responded that the message was "inappropriate" and "offensive," and that she has nothing to apologize for.

Ginni Thomas is now getting beaten up in the media, but I think we should cut her some slack.

Since that hearing in 1991, Anita Hill has gotten on with her life.

Ginni Thomas, on the other hand, has had to get on with Clarence Thomas.

So who got the better deal?

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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