The pre-Roe Clergy Consultation Service and post-Roe Catholics for a Free Choice (which would later change its name to Catholics for Choice) had different missions, strategies, and constituencies, but both aimed at a common goal: destigmatizing abortion and undermining religious arguments that deemed it an immoral and evil act. Many Protestants and Catholics agreed with some or all that these pro-choice groups stood for, far more than would ever actually be affiliated with either organization, but countless numbers of other Christians in both camps stood in opposition to abortion long after Roe. No issue roiled American politics in the 1980s more than abortion, and large sectors of the voting population increasingly saw it as a litmus test for candidates: the staunchest pro-choice feminists vigorously opposed political candidates from their own party if they were lukewarm on reproductive choice, while resolute pro-life conservatives had an equally hard time supporting Republicans who deemed restricting abortion a low priority. At the edges of the abortion debate, anti-abortion activists calling for violence began to emerge, such as the Army of God, an underground group formed in 1982 and viewed by the US government as a terrorist organization for tactics such as kidnapping and murdering doctors who performed abortions. Almost no ordinary citizen opposed to abortion would have advocated the murder of providers, but that extreme element showed how profoundly consequential people on all sides believed this issue to be.
A hallmark of 1980s activism was the growth of overt political outspokenness by religious leaders on questions like that of abortion. The politicization of abortion, however, had mixed effects. During that decade, pollsters noted increasing polarization concerning attitudes toward abortion: whereas the majority of Americans continued to say that they favored the legality of abortion in some but not all circumstances—consistently the most widespread opinion expressed by citizens across the political spectrum—attitudes were gradually shifting toward a more visible pro-choice consensus. Pro-life activism by conservative Protestant and Catholic leaders aimed to stem that tide, and surely stirred up much anti-abortion sentiment in their ranks, but pro-life activists also sufficiently angered enough moderates who had been more or less indifferent to abortion to shift certain voting blocs toward supporting pro-choice candidates, or at least favoring abortion’s legality. White evangelical opposition to abortion would eventually exceed that of American Catholics, a slim majority of whom told pollsters abortion should be legal in all or most cases.75
Abortion would remain a brutally divisive religious and political issue after the 1980s, of course. But it was during that decade that vast numbers of Americans with passionately held moral viewpoints—feminist and progressive on one side, traditional and conservative on the other—came to fear that there was no political middle ground. The old Christian consensus on gender roles was further splintering, and an ever more divided religious and political culture seemed to be the result. Emotions remained raw into the early 1990s, when another explosive issue burst into the national consciousness and got the whole country talking about yet another topic relating to gender and sex: harassment in the workplace.
CHAPTER 7
SEXUAL HARASSMENT AT CENTURY’S END
IN THE FALL OF 1991, the nation was transfixed by the confirmation hearings of the conservative African American jurist Clarence Thomas, whom President George H. W. Bush had nominated as associate justice of the US Supreme Court. Nearing the end of what had already been a lengthy review by the Senate Judiciary Committee, a written statement sent confidentially to staffers for the committee chair, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE), was leaked to the public. According to the statement’s writer, a law professor named Anita Hill who had worked for Thomas some years earlier, the nominee had a taste for hard-core pornography and a penchant for discussing it and other sexual matters with subordinates in the workplace, or at least with her; working under these conditions had made her extremely uncomfortable. These allegations of sexual harassment threatened to derail Thomas’s nomination and ruin his personal and professional reputation. Hill—who is also African American—was subpoenaed and appeared before the committee on October 11, sandwiched in between appearances by Thomas denying the charges and defending his record. Millions of Americans tuned in, weighed in, and fiercely debated which party was telling the truth.
Two and a half years later, sexual harassment allegations again rocked American politics. This time, they involved the new president of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton. Paula Jones, a onetime employee of the state of Arkansas, filed a lawsuit in May 1994 alleging that Clinton, while governor of Arkansas in 1991, had commanded Jones to be brought to his hotel room during a state-sponsored conference. There, according to her, he behaved abominably and attempted to persuade her to perform sexual acts before she escaped, shocked and shaken. Once again, Americans were treated to explicit details of alleged sexual intimidation and a bitter he said/she said exchange over the truth. And once again, Americans expressed strikingly divergent views toward a woman asserting actionable mistreatment by a prominent government official.
Law professor Anita Hill is sworn in at the Senate Judiciary hearing, where she elaborated her allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. BETTMANN VIA GETTY IMAGES.
The scandals surrounding Thomas and Clinton produced competing, utterly polarized, and often sensationalized story lines about each protagonist. Many of these drew on old stereotypes about wanton women and black hyper-sexuality, others on victimization plotlines sympathizers were eager to believe. Anita Hill was a courageous heroine to women everywhere, or she was a shrew whose unrequited sexual obsession for her boss had prompted her to seek revenge. Clarence Thomas was a successful lawyer who had overcome racial barriers only to be persecuted by a hoax because he was a conservative and a Christian, or he was a bullying boss with some twisted erotic tastes. Paula Jones was a brave ingénue defending her dignity, or she was slutty trailer park trash out for fame and money. Bill Clinton was a brilliant politician with desperate enemies, or he was a mendacious playboy whose slick affability masked a gross sense of sexual entitlement. Whatever the facts in either case—and none of the charges were definitively proven in either—both expanded the nation’s interest in sexual harassment and fostered discussion of women’s rights, workplace boundaries, and the reach of the law. Far from unifying Americans in a shared commitment to dignity for female workers, however, these events tore further asunder norms of civility between political rivals, resulting in an intensely partisan discussion riven by divergent aims.
Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, speaks to a reporter about her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton. CYNTHIA JOHNSON/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES.
Many other divisive developments around gender and sexuality were occurring in this same period, as an organized religious right continued to rise and mobilize conservatives against a wide range of feminist and progressive causes. Sex education controversies persisted in school districts across the country. Conflicts over abortion remained potent, and mass marches organized by both sides attracted large crowds to Washington, DC: the 1989 and 1992 pro-choice March for Women’s Lives and the 1990 pro-life Rally for Life each attracted hundreds of thousands of people. The AIDS crisis brought with it a backlash against gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, and a growing LGBT rights movement was rising. All of these issues generated tumultuous hostility in the 1990s. But among all the battles that resulted from that hostility, nothing better revealed the hardening—and increasingly politicized—divisions among American Christians over matters of sexual morality than did the linked sexual harassment scandals ensnaring Thomas and Clinton. For while Christian conservatives rallied solidly to Thomas’s side against Hill in 1991, they doggedly supported Jones against Clinton, raising a new, religiously inflected outcry against sexual harassment at the very time that it served their own political ends.
The harassment debates of the 1990s revealed a coming of age in the sexual politics of the Christian right
, as conservative Christian leaders found a way to shift from a purely “anti” politics—anti–sex education, anti-abortion, etc.—to a politics that blended a defense of public propriety with a selective, politically expedient quasi-feminism. That position sprang out of a selective concern regarding sexual harassment, a concern that was surely earnest to a degree but that also served broader goals of electing candidates sympathetic to the moral vision of the Christian right. In navigating the sexual harassment debate, conservative Christians both appropriated and distanced themselves from contemporary feminist commitments and ideas. In so doing, they flipped from merely opposing “sexual harassment” as an idea cooked up by lefty feminists to deploying it selectively in defense of Christian virtue. That shift helps explain why, by the end of the Clinton presidency, Americans had lost any consensus that might have been forged regarding sexual harassment or the definition of modern feminism: these had been turned into political weapons used on both sides of the aisle.
ANITA FAYE HILL WAS BORN into a family of African American farmers in Okmulgee County, Oklahoma, the youngest of thirteen children. She grew up in modest surroundings and was encouraged to work hard at everything she did. With the rest of her family, she was active in the local Baptist church and identified as a devout Christian. Shy and bookish by nature, Hill performed at a very high level in school—“one of the two smartest kids I’ve taught in the last thirty years,” stated one teacher to journalists Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson in the aftermath of the Thomas hearings—and graduated as the valedictorian from her predominantly white high school in 1973.1 She earned an undergraduate degree in psychology from Oklahoma State University in 1977 and a JD from the School of Law at Yale University in 1980. After a year working at a law firm in Washington, DC, she met Clarence Thomas through a mutual friend. He had just been appointed assistant secretary of education for civil rights and offered her a job in his office; she accepted and began working for him in the summer of 1981.
Both Hill and Thomas later agreed that their professional relationship at the beginning of this period was very cordial and productive. From there, their stories dramatically diverged: according to Hill, Thomas persistently asked her out and used work situations to talk about sex acts, sexual organs, and scenes he’d watched in pornographic films, as well as “his own sexual prowess”; her efforts to change the subject were “rarely successful.”2 The following year, after what she described to the Senate Judiciary Committee as a temporary end to Thomas’s “offensive” behavior, she accepted his offer to move with him to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). There, Hill said, his sexual overtures and vulgar banter resumed and worsened until she began to look for other work. (Thomas denied all of these allegations.) In 1983, Hill joined the law faculty at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, a good fit for her own Christian faith even if a big step down professionally.3
Hill taught for three years at Oral Roberts before the university sold the law school in 1986 to Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network University in Virginia (later Regent University). She then accepted a faculty position at the University of Oklahoma, where she earned tenure in 1990. At both law schools, Hill was a well-regarded member of the faculty. The University of Oklahoma awarded her a prestigious post as a faculty administrative fellow in the Office of the Provost. Until President Bush nominated Thomas to the Supreme Court, there were no indications that she ever planned to tell her account of working with him to any but a few very close friends. As she later recounted in her autobiography, she felt she had “successfully overcome my experience with Thomas to the point of disregarding it,” rising above the harassment for the sake of her own happiness.4
Then, on July 1, 1991, President Bush announced Thomas as his choice to succeed Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had announced his retirement after nearly twenty-four years on the nation’s highest court as its first black justice. Although Thomas’s name had been in wide circulation as a potential nominee, he lacked judicial experience, having served on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals for less than two years. He was extremely conservative in his politics and seemed, if confirmed, almost certain to move the court to the right. It was widely believed that Bush had specifically aimed to replace a black liberal justice with a black conservative, a point that angered many American liberals. African Americans were particularly divided over Thomas: supporters such as writer Maya Angelou worried that if his appointment were scuttled, “another conservative possibly more harmful, and one who has neither our history nor culture in common with us” would get the seat instead; opponents concerned about his anti–affirmative action record, such as civil rights leader Julian Bond, countered that there was no way Thomas’s race would “overcome his hostility toward civil rights remedies” or equal opportunity, making his appointment a true disaster for black Americans.5
As news of the nomination began to sink in, Hill later recalled, a friend urged her to disclose her experience with Thomas, but Hill replied that she was not certain what she should or would do. Days before the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings were to start on September 10, according to Hill, staffers who worked for members of that committee contacted her and asked about allegations of harassment against Thomas and rumors that he had sexually harassed Hill herself. Worried about the consequences of proceeding, she waited a few days before saying that she would disclose the information as long as it remained confidential and out of the press. To avoid the appearance of looking partisan, the matter was passed to the FBI for investigation. Hill wrote a four-page statement of her experience working with Thomas; she faxed it to a staffer on September 23, the same day two FBI agents came to interview her at her house.6
On Friday, September 27, when the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on whether to recommend Thomas’s candidacy to the full Senate, the vote was deadlocked at 7–7. The committee then voted 13–1 to present Thomas’s candidacy to the full Senate, with no favorable recommendation attached. Determined reporters—notably, Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio and Timothy Phelps of Newsday—began investigating why the vote was so close. Over the following week, as word of Hill’s statement began to leak, both Totenberg and Phelps contacted Hill, who agreed to speak with Totenberg only when the reporter appeared to have already received her written statement from other sources. On the evening of October 5, Phelps’s story hit the news wires; Totenberg’s radio broadcast, which included excerpts from a taped interview with Hill, came the next morning. The impact was stunning and, for Thomas, devastating. He later told the Senate Judiciary Committee that when he learned this story was going to be in the press, “I died. The person you knew, whether you voted for me or against me, died.”7
Thomas’s Senate supporters were also mortified and appalled by the charges. These included political moderates, like those who initially championed him for his independent intellect, sense of fairness, and overall integrity. Prominent supporters who had worked closely with him over the years were certain that Thomas could not be guilty of the vile conduct alleged by Hill and were outraged that such dirty tricks were in play to derail his nomination. A decent man’s reputation was being sullied by charges forged out of fantasy or revenge, and his very career was at stake.
The allegations against Thomas, now public, occasioned a second round of Judiciary Committee hearings later that week. The hearings were a national spectacle and unquestionably a source of humiliation for Thomas and Hill alike. With millions of Americans glued to their TV screens, senators prodded both Thomas and Hill with repetitious questions about highly personal and embarrassing sexual matters. Senators seeking to discredit Hill, who was questioned for nearly nine hours, impugned her motivations, one asking in quick succession, “Are you a scorned woman?… Are you a zealoting civil rights believer that progress will be turned back, if Clarence Thomas goes on the Court?… Do you have a militant attitude relative to the area of civil rights?… Do you have a martyr complex?” Thomas, returning to the stand after Hill’s testimon
y, denounced the day’s event as a “travesty” and a “national disgrace,” a “disgusting” display of “sleaze,” “dirt,” “gossip,” and “lies” that had been orchestrated by committee staffers, leaked to the media, and then “validated” through this prime time display over national television. His opening statement concluded powerfully that the proceedings represented “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an older order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”8 Whoever was telling the truth, this had been a soul-destroying day for both parties.
The politics of race were central to this inquiry, and no community was more divided in their views of it than African Americans. Across the country, black men typically (but not always) rallied to Thomas’s side. Black women were more divided: many passionately favored Hill, but large numbers backed Thomas instead. The legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw later remembered a group of African American Christians, mostly women, who at the Capitol surrounded her and two other African American lawyers working to defend Hill against Thomas’s denials, their “hands linked in song and praise, seeking God’s help to vanquish this latest threat to Thomas’s elevation to the Supreme Court.” Black feminists who were frustrated by that attitude would eventually write a manifesto, signed by nearly sixteen hundred women and published in the New York Times as well as other papers across the country, that denounced “the racist and sexist treatment of Professor Anita Hill.”9
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