Fox News is one of those things where you either love it or you hate it. It still has a relatively strong viewership of primarily white conservatives, a pretty sizeable chunk of the American population. But with the Roger Ailes sexual harassment and sexual assault charges piling up high enough to start rivaling Bill Cosby’s, there are some things that come to light concerning the conservative right and what they think is acceptable.
First, allow me to point you in the direction of “The Young Turks,” a liberal news station channel run on YouTube, and their coverage of this astronomical debacle. Please be warned, there are some disturbing survivor accounts of Ailes’s piggish behavior, so please be wary if you are sensitive to the subject of sexual assault:
Here’s the thing: conservatives are constantly talking about “family values” and how everything is poisoning it. According to them, an equally sizable chunk of the American population is destroying “family values” because we are too young, too “sexually deviant,” not Anglo-Saxon white American, not Christian, not sexually assigned as male, not pro-life.
I hope that those same conservatives can tell the rest of us, then, why it’s okay for a white, Christian male, who “stands for” these so-called “family values,” to practice such backwards, disgusting behavior. If they want us to “think of the children,” then they need to do the same. There is nothing wrong with being a man and loving a man, but there is something wrong with a man with power using his power to get sexual favors from a person who he has power over in terms of rank within an organization. It’s called sexual harassment, and it’s a pretty textbook example. It’s not like some law that nobody believes or knows about that one state has written into their books. So why are these guys acting as if they’re so surprised when they get caught and exposed?
These so-called “family values” mean nothing to me when the people who preach the phrase can’t even practice it for themselves. The Duggar family has no right to condemn people when their son should be registered as a sex offender and predator, just as the viewers of Fox News who continue to support Ailes should not be allowed to condemn anyone until they condemn him for what he’s done. Earlier this week, after apparently saying that he would resign, the network took back its statement, leaving the question of whether Ailes will face any repercussions up to chance and a largely flawed justice system which sometimes does it right, but sometimes heavily disappoints us.
If they really care about “family values,” then they ought to put themselves or at least someone they care about in the shoes of these women who are coming out of the woodwork to call him out. Apparently we live in a country where sexual predators and offenders get six months prison for being a “good, rich, white boy” (see Brock Turner, a rapist whose worst punishment is being registered as a sex offender; for an example related to manslaughter instead, see Ethan Couch, the “affluenza” boy) before deciding that they’re too stupid and infantile to understand the consequences of what they’ve done when they’ve raped (or killed) someone. I’m sick and tired of seeing scum like this get off easy. Sure, we have it better than some other countries where rapists get absolutely no punishment and all praise, but that is sad and pathetic. Women don’t deserve to live in fear of being the next “one in four” statistic on their college campus or off of it. We have to deal with enough problems as it is, with unequal pay and cat-callers, with inflated pricing on “feminine” products and double standards. It seems like a large population of the public (conservatives) really are stuck in the 1950s when “everything was simple” and everyone was racist, sexist and afraid of change. It’s a pretty well-known fact that conservative Republicans hate women.
It doesn’t exactly stop there either. With this week came the unfortunate circus that is the RNC, which honestly should scare more people than “excite” them to vote for a textbook example of a fascist dictator. Clearly, “family values” did no matter one bit to conservative Republicans when they were giving statements and speeches. Apparently, Melania Trump knows what it’s like to grow up as an African American woman in Chicago after her speech writer Meredith McIver plagiarized entire passages of Michelle Obama’s speech from eight years ago, while there were multiple instances of just outright dangerous behavior. Al Baldasaro, one of Trump’s advisors, said that Hillary Clinton should “be put on the firing line and shot for treason,” while Trump said multiple times that he would build his infamous wall and deport, at this point, anyone who isn’t Caucasian. If you look foreign, he might target you for the next ticket out of the country. And, just as any other Trump rally, another protestor was beaten up and sent packing by his insane fans and supporters. In other countries where mob mentality rules or is generally acceptable, it reaps horrible consequences, particularly on the front of average, every day people.
Would anyone really dare to call those “family values?” Saying that someone should be shot publicly, or that people should be assaulted for having different opinions? Is it really okay, conservatives, to sexually harass and assault women because they’re attractive? There are so many things that are wrong with the conservative platform that makes them, not only unconvincing to me and other liberals, but absolutely terrifying. This election is already dangerously close, since Hillary Clinton’s lead is barely outside of the margin of error right now, and we could very well end up with a President Trump and an even more uncertain future. Even with the conspiracies that he’ll quit even if he wins and give it to someone else (Pence, perhaps), allowing the mentality that he cultivates is an even more terrifying prospect. Unless “family values” now actually means “violence, hatred and intolerance,” then conservatives ought to stop using that phrase.