Joe Biden: ‘No Man Has a Right to Lay a Hand on a Woman’
Former Vice president stands moral high ground of sexual abuse
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Former Vice President Joe Biden said that women who suffer sexual assaults are victims in “a white man’s culture” that turns a blind eye to sexual assault and misconduct.
Biden was speaking at an event to combat sexual violence on college campuses when he gave his speech seemingly racist tone.
“To this day I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to give her the kind of hearing she deserved,” Biden said Tuesday.
“But I also realized there was a real and perceived problem the [Senate Judiciary] committee faced: They’re a bunch of white guys.”
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The Democrat continued:
“No, I mean it sincerely — a bunch of white guys…hearing this testimony. So…when Anita Hill came to testify; she faced a committee that didn’t fully understand what the hell it was all about.”
Biden was on the judiciary chairman for the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings where he was criticized for his approach of the Hill situation.
Hill accused Thomas of harassment while he was her supervisor at the time.
“Last fall, you saw it all over again in the Kavanaugh hearing,” Biden blasted.
“Almost 30 years…the culture — the institutional culture — has not changed. We have an obligation to change the culture in this country.”
Biden then addressed the popular misconception about the “rule of thumb” - an old reference to British common law and tolerance to abuse in the home.
“This is English jurisprudential culture — a white man’s culture,” Biden said, describing how people think the “rule of thumb” was a law that allowed husbands to beat their wives with sticks no thicker than their thumbs.
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“It’s got to change,” he reiterated.
Biden then said domestic abuse was “about the abuse of power.”
“It’s not about sex,” he said.
“It’s about power. The most insidious abuse of power of all. And right now we live in a culture where the abuse of power is allowed to penetrate the highest offices of government, where it lives in board rooms and global corporations, and it poisons entire industries — from Hollywood to hotel workers. It pushes down women all around the world.”
Biden, who spoke for almost half an hour, used his speech to denounce violence against women.
“No man has a right to lay a hand on a woman, no matter what she’s wearing, she does, who she is…Never,” Biden said.
“If you see a brother taking an inebriated co-ed up the stairs at a fraternity house and you don’t go and stop it, you’re a damn coward. You don’t deserve to be called a man.”
In June 2018, Biden was confronted by a heckler while promoting his book
Halfway through discussing the book, a heckler stood up and shouted: "What about the girls you molested on C-SPAN at the Senate swearing-in?"
The heckler was quickly escorted out of the building.
