Is Joe Biden’s Habit Of Weirdly Touching Women Wrong, Disqualifying, Or Both? Joe Biden’s habit of affectionately touching and kissing women in professional settings is well-established. Is it wrong? If so, is it also disqualifying?
By Emily Jashinsky
April 2, 2019Joe Biden’s habit of affectionately touching and kissing women in professional settings is well-established. He can’t deny it and shouldn’t try, given that he’s long behaved this way in full public view, which also suggests he’s never really believed the behavior to be wrong.
Is it? And if it’s wrong, is it also disqualifying? For all the outrage and the memeing, these are the relevant questions, and they’re absolutely different. As much as I’d like to mock Biden, who seems poised to jump into the Democratic Party’s presidential primary, I don’t want to perpetuate the notion that what he did was either wrong or disqualifying if it wasn’t. Standards are important, and influence the precedents we set. (Democrats might be remembering an ousted senator by the name of Al Franken right about now.)
To the question of whether it’s wrong, one of Biden’s most memorable “victims†doesn’t believe it was. Images of the former vice president’s touchy behavior with Stephanie Carter while her husband was sworn in as defense secretary in 2015 went viral at the time, seeming to perfectly encapsulate the dynamics between creepy men and the uncomfortable female subjects of their misplaced intimacy. But Carter disagrees with that narrative entirely.
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https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/02/joe-bidens-habit-weirdly-touching-women-wrong-disqualifying/
