OPINION:
Segregation can be effective, and properly applied might cure many cultural diseases to the benefit of all. What we need now is a return to a segregated society. This time, not segregation by race. We’ve been there, done that, and it was evil and cruel. No one wants that.
The solution is segregation by sex. (“Gender” for the squeamish.) Male and female God made them, the Good Book says, but as wise as the Creator was, He forgot, perhaps distracted by the beauty of the fairest work of the divine hand, to look ahead to consider how dumb and foolish the descendants of the glorious Eve and the hopeless Adam, left alone to abuse free will, could be.
So we must find a way to separate male from female. Otherwise, we may never again have a president of the United States. There’s a reason why every Army that ever marched punished, usually severely, the battlefield felony of fraternizing with the enemy.
Such fraternizing has led to the sexual chaos of the present day, when even such an august personage as a vice president of the United States cannot keep his nose out of the hair, dirty or not, of the female of the species.
Now another sister of the party of the first part says Joe Biden, the foolish party of the second part, grabbed her by the head, “put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth.” (Noses sometimes get in the way.)
Grabbing a lady by the head, though perhaps less serious than grabbing her the way Donald Trump once suggested grabbing her, is still regarded as a high crime in certain circles, and now Mr. Biden and the Democrats must pay. Mr. Biden can be sent back to the minors to reflect on his behavior and, if he is, the Democrats may in a fit of politically correct foolishness throw away their best chance to deprive Donald Trump of four more years of driving his partisan tormentors up the wall he’s building on the Mexican border.
The latest accuser does not have much of a complaint beyond a nose that suffered less damage than a nose left too long in the sun. “I never filed a complaint, to be honest,” she said, “because he was the vice president. I was a nobody. There’s absolutely a line of decency. There’s a line of respect. Crossing that line is not grandfatherly. It’s not affection. It’s sexism or misogyny.”
The photograph that emerged of the lady and her nose standing with Mr. Biden does not show either a damaged nose or a wounded psyche, and it is not clear whether this is a before-or-after photograph, but the lady wears an expectant smile a mile wide. If Mr. Biden’s reputation as a serial nose-rubber was as well known as we are now being told it was, you might think the lady would have shown terror, not a wide smile.
Now she’s no longer a nobody, but she had a right to escape a nose rub, just as the accuser of the first part had a right not to have had a kiss planted in the mass of hair on the back of her head. She said she was doubly embarrassed — “I just froze” — by the fact that she had not recently washed her hair. The veep, let the record show, did not complain of unwashed hair, but the moral is clear. A lady just naturally feels better with clean hair.
Mr. Biden’s rivals for the Democratic nomination leaped to chide him for his monumental moral lapse, as we now define modern monumental moral lapses. Pocahontas suffered a heap big shock! shock! at the news of the hair-kissing. Amy Klobuchar said she had “no reason not to believe [the accuser]” so there was no reason to delay a verdict that the former good ol’ Joe is guilty of the crimes of the century.
But who could have guessed that so many grown women, who think they’re tough enough to withstand the pressures of a presidency, wouldn’t know how to deal with hair-do sniffers and nose-rubbers. Not all snowflakes live on a college campus.
A way must be found to separate men and women. Women must not be forced to live under lascivious gazes and endure sweaty kisses and hard rubs. Women who once withered seduction with a fierce frown, now need help for their granddaughters. How to do it, and still get great-granddaughters, must be the decisive issue of the 2020 campaign.
• Wesley Pruden is editor in chief emeritus of The Times.
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