In the end, Thomas’s nomination withstood Hill’s testimony, and the Senate voted 52–48 to confirm him to the Supreme Court. “Whoop-dee-damn-doo,” he later recalled responding when his wife, Virginia, told him about the vote; the ordeal had just been too brutal for him to feel triumphant.10 Both Hill and Thomas later disclosed private moments of hopeless despair in the wake of the hearings. Nonetheless, he took the oath of office into government service on October 18, 1991, exactly one week after Hill’s testimony.
The rival behind-the-scenes campaigns to discredit both figures abated little after the hearings, and the relentless mockery of everyone involved had to be tough to take.11 Popular TV shows repeatedly skewered the congressional proceedings for mortifying everyone involved while failing to get anywhere close to determining the truth.12 Thomas later recalled that God had helped him to rise “phoenixlike from the ashes of self-pity and despair” after his confirmation, yet his “wounds were still raw” and would only heal “in time.”13 He felt he had received sickening treatment from “my enemies,” a phrase that appeared ten times in Thomas’s memoir; all but one referred to his opponents during the hearings, and the last came from Psalm 30: “I will praise you, LORD, for you have rescued me. You refused to let my enemies triumph over me.”14 Thomas had many supporters who bore him up, but moving on from his own lynching, as he continued to feel it, was no simple task.
Neither was it for Hill, whose world had likewise been forever transformed by her televised testimony. Messages poured in, by phone and mail, from people who praised or excoriated her. Many letters came from people outraged by what they deemed the unfair treatment of her by Senate interrogators, from people who had experienced sexual harassment themselves, and from people who were simply indignant at the apparent ineptitude of their representatives in Congress. Some offered her their “support and prayers.”15 Others, though fewer, sent “threatening, vulgar, and just plain cruel messages,” she later recalled. But she took strength in the letters of support, which “were crucial to my endurance and ultimately to my recovery,” as were the comforts of daily prayer, friends, and family.16 The solace Hill took in correspondence from harassment victims highlighted what she perceived to be the cosmic gap in understanding between those who had experienced harassment and those insulated from it. Hill felt the sympathizers understood her; she shared a “common experience” with those who believed her, whatever the detractors might say.17
The hearings left the nation raw as well, on the right no less than the left. For some conservatives, the hearings provided an important lesson in the dangers of feminism run amok, blind to justice and truth as it sought women’s empowerment at any cost. The Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson may have spoken for many when he acknowledged the believability of Hill’s account while deriding as “unfair and disingenuous” her choice, as he saw it, to raise this issue ten years after the fact. The alleged infraction didn’t matter anyway, argued Patterson, since it was simply talk that “neo-Puritan America” could not abide. Thomas’s words, if spoken, caused no harm and were certainly no basis for losing a seat on the nation’s highest court. Even if Thomas had said these things, wrote Patterson, he was right to deny them because the “grossly unfair punishment”—losing the chance to be a Supreme Court justice—was disproportionately severe. Women, Patterson noted, needed to “escape the trap of neo-Puritan feminism with its reactionary sacralization of women’s bodies” and learn better ways of getting along with men in the workplace. Fortunately, justice had prevailed, and the nation was newly aware of “the progress in racial and gender relations already achieved by this country,” despite the “superficial liberal stereotypes” of kneejerk feminism, the chief subject of Patterson’s ire.18
Many conservative Christians also saw feminists as the real troublemakers in the Hill-Thomas debacle, and their analysis aligned precisely with the critiques that had been emerging from Christian right leaders for decades. Writing in the conservative Protestant periodical Christianity Today a month after Thomas’s confirmation, the evangelical Christian leader Chuck Colson blamed the lies promoted by Hill’s supporters on the “militant feminism” that came from a “diabolical source” opposed to God, calling feminism a force that undermined “the very notion of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman.” Colson drew connections to many of the sexual controversies of the past: “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.”19 Right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, who famously scorned Hill’s supporters and other feminists as “femi-Nazis,” echoed Colson’s critique that the hearings revealed “the extent to which feminists and their political allies are willing to go to advance their proabortion, militant leftist, antimale agenda.” Hill lied—of that Limbaugh was certain—but liberals were either too dumb to see that or too ideological to care, holding a hypocritical “double standard” that looked away from the egregiously harassing behavior of liberal men such as Ted Kennedy to push their own interests.20
Thomas had already been a rising star in conservative political circles—indeed, they had played a large role in propelling his nominations both to the DC Circuit and the highest court—and the hearings deepened admiration for him among a broad range of social conservatives, including many who were leaders in the Christian right. Besides Colson and Limbaugh, his influential conservative Christian supporters included Paul Weyrich, an architect of the new Christian right who famously came up with the name “Moral Majority” for Jerry Falwell’s political organization and who founded several influential groups such as the Free Congress Foundation; Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed, whose Christian Coalition promoted Thomas’s candidacy through a $1 million ad campaign; and Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, who chaired the Citizens Committee to Confirm Clarence Thomas. Other prominent conservatives who supported Thomas included lawyer and commentator Laura Ingraham, who clerked for Thomas during his second year on the Supreme Court, and media personality Limbaugh—who became a close personal friend and whose third wedding Thomas hosted and officiated less than three years after his confirmation.21 Rosalie (“Ricky”) Silberman, who had served with Thomas at the EEOC, ardently supported him during the confirmation hearings and called Hill’s supporters “extreminists.” Afterward, she worked with others to turn an informal network of women calling itself Women for Judge Thomas into the Independent Women’s Forum, a nonprofit political organization focused on policy issues pertaining to women—what the group called a “conservative alternative to feminist tenets.”22
Indeed, Thomas Jipping of Weyrich’s Christian think tank later wrote of Thomas, “the entire conservative movement not only supports him, but believes in him.”23 Weyrich’s group, the Free Congress Foundation, worked hard for Thomas’s nomination, drafting countless press releases and other reports shopped to the media and circulated in the Senate. A year after Thomas’s confirmation, Jipping and Phyllis Berry-Myers—who worked together with Hill and Thomas at the EEOC and who testified in Thomas’s favor during the hearings—wrote for the Free Congress Foundation to explain the deceitfulness they spied behind Hill’s testimony: “Left-wing interest groups, intent on derailing Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court, knew they had to manufacture a bombshell relative to Thomas’s character because they would not defeat him on the merits. Like aggressive public-interest lawyers, they picked their plaintiffs and developed their facts.”24 The Christian groups were certainly no less aggressive in fighting what they believed was a holy war: as one journalist later wrote, “most important” to this confirmation battle “was Paul Weyrich’s network of antiabortion, antipornography, pro-school prayer activists stretching across the country” and the “war room” Weyrich set
up in DC to rebut each charge against Thomas.25
To these Christian conservatives, despite her own claims to Christian faith, Hill was a liar pure and simple—a shill to the special interest groups who invented her tall tale—and sexual harassment was a laughable charge. Gary Bauer’s Citizens’ Committee ran ads on television that showed mud being splattered on Thomas’s face; other ads likewise paid for by conservative religious and political groups similarly claimed Hill’s charges were the invention of abortion-rights-forever feminists out to smear Thomas’s good character. Most agreed with the outburst of one senator during the confirmation hearings who, while saying he took the issue seriously, called Hill’s charges “this sexual harassment crap.”26
The Christian Coalition, an enormously successful and influential conservative political advocacy group—the brainchild of religious broadcaster Pat Robertson that was led by executive director Ralph Reed—also worked hard for Thomas’s confirmation and outright dismissed any chance that Hill could be telling the truth. Coalition members reportedly bombarded the Senate with a hundred thousand petitions, letters, and phone calls promoting him.27 Later recalling Thomas’s successful confirmation as “one of our biggest victories,” Reed wrote that Christian Coalition national and state leaders all agreed that “Thomas’ confirmation was a major priority,” as his was believed to be a reliable pro-family voice on the court. It was hoped that he would be the fifth vote in a much anticipated effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 opinion that removed restrictions on abortion.28 The conservative Christian pro-family movement for Thomas’s confirmation was about abortion and family values; it was not an attack on sexual harassment law per se. The real damage done was by “the feminists and the pro-abortion lobby,” wrote Reed, though it ultimately came to good ends: “I have always felt that the vicious treatment of Thomas (and Robert Bork) by the radical left helped to inspire our movement to encourage people of faith to make a difference and become an influential force on Capitol Hill.”29
In fact, Reed started writing a novel about Thomas’s battle in 1991, at the very time that he headed the Christian Coalition and was mobilizing support for Thomas’s nomination. Published later, the novel, titled The Confirmation, featured characters and events bearing more than a passing resemblance to those in the hearings. Interestingly, the figure representing Anita Hill—Maria Solis (homophonous with “soulless”), the Latina ex-girlfriend of Supreme Court nominee Marco Diaz—is a troubled person who means no real harm and winds up dead before she can testify; the real evildoer is the white feminist Christy Love, a ferocious “lobbyist-cum-grassroots agitator” who is “borderline irrational” and described as “that witch at Pro-Choice PAC” who would “back over her own mother to stop Diaz from getting on the Court.”30 (Reed was not going for literary nuance.) The villainous Love is blamed for Solis’s death, while the curse of another feminist kills the unborn child in Diaz’s wife’s womb (“I think she must be a witch or something”). The treachery all comes down to feminism, but in the end Diaz is confirmed, simply and completely “because of the power of prayer.”31 The point of the book, as Reed said, was to show that the hearings were not just a political battle but a spiritual battle between good and evil, and that all the attacks in the world could not compare to godly people working to build God’s kingdom. The moral of the story: the “good guys”—men much like Reed and his allies saw themselves, men of faith and prayer, conservative men opposed to feminists and witches and other agents of evil—win.32
This was a pretty standard view of feminism among conservative Christians during the Thomas hearings: sexual harassment claims could still seem laughable and exaggerated, or the fault of feminist political correctness. Influential spokesmen for the right seemed to waver in discussing sexual harassment, vacillating between claims that (a) sexual harassment as a national problem deserving attention is vastly overblown and (b) sexual harassment is liberals’ fault. Limbaugh made both arguments. An example of argument (a) appeared in his 1992 book, The Way Things Ought to Be, in which he wrote, “The vast majority of American women, 63 percent according to the polls, didn’t believe Anita Hill and don’t think sexual harassment is the most important issue of our time. Plus, they also think they can handle the situation themselves.”33 Argument (b) made a stronger appearance in his 1993 book, See, I Told You So, which contains several passages such as this one:
Isn’t it also ironic that the same crowd that supports handing out condoms to students is shocked that there is a rise in sexual harassment in the schools? What do you expect when you teach kids moral relativism and that premarital, and perverted, sex is to be encouraged? When the Ten Commandments are off limits, and it’s against the law to teach abstinence, what kinds of messages are we sending these children? We give kids condoms, we tell them how to use them, and, when they do, we’re shocked.
These arguments coexisted easily: in the second book, Limbaugh insisted that feminists were hypersensitive enough to insist that merely “looking at someone is sexual harassment,” that “all men are rapists,” and that “all sex is rape.”34 To the extent that sexual harassment was a problem—mostly for children forced to grow up in a sex-obsessed culture—liberals were to blame; for real grownups, though, it was no problem at all.
Limbaugh’s speech sometimes veered into the margins of far-right conspiratorialism; here, however, his words sounded representative of a fairly commonplace aversion to feminism. While his usual put-down—“Feminism was established so that unattractive women could have easier access to the mainstream of society”—was fairly toothless, his real message was more dire. Even without feminism, women were fearsome, potentially terrifying creatures: “The fact of the matter is that women have far more power than most of them realize. It’s a biological fact that males are the aggressors. We all know this is true. That means that the ultimate power—the power to say yes or no—lies with women.” Unfortunately, “some militant feminists apparently harbor such animosity for the opposite sex that they want to criminalize the process of courtship—the old-fashioned ‘chase.’” This was a real problem, that “seduction is being confused with harassment.” As a result, men were being persecuted unfairly, solely because of a “political agenda… called breaking down barriers” that was really about stoking hatred between the sexes and dividing people. That “elite corps of abortion-on-demand zealots I call femi-Nazis” were playing a “victimization game” that would ultimately destroy men. It would furthermore spread homosexuality, “moral relativism,” and other “sick and weird behavior.” In the end, the femi-Nazis’ political agenda would “consume our culture” until the nation was destroyed.35 Limbaugh offered a vivid illustration of the powerful connections between fear of women’s freedom, self-determination, and resistance to gender hierarchies; fear of “the other” (in this case, LGBT people); and fear of a declining, degraded American nation, irreparably damaged by the sexual activities of an inside enemy.
Just as the hearings cemented the support of conservative Christians for Thomas, the hearings made Hill an overnight celebrity among liberals, particularly liberal women. They pledged to make the Beltway culture of Washington more hospitable to women and vowed to put sexual harassment at the forefront of policyholders’ minds and to work for stronger enforcement of harassment laws in the workplace. Progressive Christians, and especially progressive Christian women, redoubled their own commitment to fighting sexual harassment and other modes of sexual misconduct within the church. As one writer put it, “The name ‘Anita Hill’ has become a metaphor for women’s issues.”36
Democrats invited Hill to speak at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, where Bill Clinton was nominated as the party’s candidate against President Bush. Hill declined that invitation, feeling that most Democrats “had done little to show any real concern about the issue of sexual harassment” or sexual assault. But she wept when she watched the convention and heard Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) declare that no woman who came forward with her story
would again be treated the way Hill was at the hearings. “As Senator Mikulski spoke and introduced the female candidates for the Senate, for the first time in months I believed that change was possible—that no other woman would have to face the public spectacle I underwent.”37
Indeed, the 1992 election saw a record number of women run for office in both major parties, leading the news media to call it “The Year of the Woman.” One hundred and fifty women (ninety-four of them Democrats, fifty-four Republicans, and two independents) filed early for seats in the US House of Representatives; twenty-one African American women were among these. Twenty-nine women filed for the US Senate, and seven ran for governor. In November, four women were elected to the Senate—Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL), and Patty Murray (D-WA)—joining the two already serving, Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS) and Mikulski. (After a special election the next year, they were joined by Kay Bailey Hutchison [R-TX].) Forty-seven women won election or reelection to the House, a gain of nineteen seats; thirty-five were Democrats and twelve Republicans. African Americans gained numbers as well: Moseley Braun was the first African American woman in the Senate, while the election increased black representation in the House from twenty-five to thirty-eight. The Senate’s treatment of Hill was widely believed to have spurred more women to run for office and to have motivated female voters to support them.38
Moral Combat Page 31