ANITA HILL VICTIMIZES THE VERY FEMINIST CAUSE SHE SPEAKS FOR

I just love having my Consciousness Raised about sexual harassment, don't you? Sunday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch Business section contained another couple of articles. These articles take us across still more frontiers of Consciousness-Raising.

We're now getting down to the details of defining the charge. For instance, we've recently been informed that such harassment occurs whenever a ManPerson in the workplace creates "a hostile environment" toward a WomanPerson. Note the studied are we permitted to say intentional? vagueness of the charge; the calculated ambiguity; the damage done to ancient Anglo-American principles of justice and fundamental fairness. I refer to such as that the burden of proof remains always on the accuser to prove her charge. And that to protect the rights of the accused, the indictment charging him must necessarily be as specific as possible.

These principles of a specific charge (or indictment) and a burden of proof placed on the complainant are so fundamental, so crucial, that they are interwoven throughout our legal and constitutional scheme. How very odd, then, that a bunch of feminist law professors would cast such ancient protections aside in the name of making their sexual harassment cases. Nor is this all they are prepared to discard.

It is massively worth noting that in the case of Anita Hill, still more damage was done to still another cherished principle of Anglo-American jurisprudence. The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, in pertinent part, that "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right .... to be confronted with the witnesses against him ..." (Note the Founding Fathers' unpardonable use of the masculine pronoun; dreadful 18th century sexists that they were!)

Now it's true, Clarence Thomas was not an "accused" in a criminal proceeding; Chairman Biden took pains to declare that the Judiciary Committee's hearings were "not a trial." But the right to know and face your accuser is so ingrained in every American concept of fairness that it surely is applicable in this instance, as in so many others. At least those who would deny it to a hapless nominee who finds himself the victim of an 11th-hour sneak attack should bear the burden of showing why such protections don't apply.

Anita Hill wanted (and expected to be able) to remain anonymous, when first recruited by committee staffers to allege her slimy, unproveable charges. This, then, is a facet of Hill's charges that received insufficient scrutiny: The undisputed fact that Miss Hill wanted to remain anonymous not just to the public but that her identity not be disclosed even to the man she was accusing! (Only when the committee staffer leaked the FBI report did Miss Hill realize that game was up, and her identity disclosed to the world, via her soulmates at National Public Radio.)

That feminists would discard so many legal and civil rights protections in sexual harassment cases is all the evidence we need that they intend this vague and menacing charge to be used as a weapon against any man they decide to target for destruction.

Anyway, back to Sunday's articles. A brief sidebar to the main article in Sunday's Post carried a headline reading: "Unwelcome Flirting Is Harassment." In the Consciousness-Raising department, the article quotes Lynn Bruner, head of the St. Louis district office of Clarence Thomas's old agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Read your way down to the ninth paragraph, and you come across the following, simply astonishing information:

"... Bruner (of the EEOC) said some issues are more subtle. A typical question she hears is, `What if I just ask somebody out on a date. Is that sexual harassment?'

"The answer:

"`If you ask them once and they say no, that is not sexual harassment,' Bruner said. `If you continue to ask them, that is sexual harassment.'"

Well, I'm tickled to death to get that straight.

Let's see now .... How many men could pass this new standard for purity the sexual fascists have established? Better yet, how many men would want to pass it? How many women want to enshrine this kind of lunacy in the civil penalties of the law? How many happy marriages, how many children, how many families would never have come into being were this the penalty governing human relationships?

"Curse the Bolsheviks," said a Russian citizen after the revolution, bemoaning the ghastly results of Communist rule in what used to be the Soviet Union. "They bring a dryness and a hardness to everything in life."

Can we not say that militant feminism partakes of this same totalitarian impulse? Is it not this "dryness," this very "hardness", this dreariness that the radical feminists bring to our lives, as they grimly set about rewriting the laws of human nature and of human behavior? Is this not a significant part of the militant feminist project? I think the answers are yes, yes and yes, and that these insights help explain their massive and continuing rejection by the American people, whose sensible and healthy attitude on this is much closer to vive la difference than it is to any chapter in the feminist catechism.

As the British writer Barbara Amiel wote last week after observing the Thomas hearings with the horror afforded by distance, "As I understand it, the feminists notwithstanding, it has not yet been made a crime for adults to discuss sex in America."

On Wednesday morning, October 16, barely 12 hours after the Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas, NBC's "Today" show featured what for them is an unusual news item. "Today" reported how, 20 years after the feminist movement really got going, young women on college campuses shun the label and indeed, run from any characterization of themselves as members of it. So feminism, which was born in the '60s, gathered momentum in the '70s, then sputtered and faltered in the '80s, before guttering out entirely in the '90s. Now, after being stunk up by a feminist hero named Anita Hill and by the feminist law "experts" so popular with Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, the word is sufficiently malodorous to most Americans that even the networks have had to observe the fact.