Dahlia Lithwick is a brilliant writer about the courts and analyzer of the law for Slate.
She has appeared many times on The Rachel Maddow Show and gives on
point well spoken analysis of many legal and court issues. The article
linked below she wrote on the alleged harassment of Judge Alex Kozinski whom she first met when she was a clerk for the chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. She discuses her response, silence to it and indicts herself for remaining silent about it for so long. Few
of us, though, I believe, should judge the path other women have chosen
to respond or not to the sexual harassment behavior of powerful men.
I
am not a lawyer but worked in milieus of the very powerful who could
fire me on a whim thereby cutting off my venue for survival forcing me
to go on the hunt for another job not easily acquired. Sometimes when
the opportunity presented itself I would argue in support of a workplace
issue that favored my employer rather than incur its wrath by arguing
for what I thought the morally right opposite position should be.
It
happens whether about sexual harassment or something else that we are
too fearful of the powerful who can determine almost literally whether
we eat or starve even live or die. I was then sometimes, if you will, a
self-admitted kisser upper because I simply never wanted, using the
cliche, to rock the boat and threaten the wrath of the more powerful.
Other times it was because it simply is not in my nature to do so. As a
Jewish woman I believe some of it, too, is in my ethnic survivalist DNA.
What will we take and how demeaning will it be to ensure we even live. I
may be way out in left field with that analysis because we know sexual
harassment crosses all ethic lines. For me, though, it is just one more
explanation among many why we do what we do.
