Feminist logic: Even if Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broaddrick, he’s not “evil”

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone that believes a rapist isn’t evil. But if you happened to visit the feminist website Wonkette — don’t worry, I did it for you — you would’ve found a Bill Clinton apologist who couldn’t quite make the same connection.

In her piece “Let’s Talk About Juanita Broaddrick,” Rebecca Schoenkopf looked back over the allegations against Clinton, admitting they’ve always “bugged” her because, after all, “[W]e are supposed to believe women when it comes to rape.” But, she continued, “For the record, I don’t ‘always’ believe women. I think some women are messed up, and some women lie.”

Yet, it appears as though Schoenkopf accepts Broaddrick’s claim that Clinton raped her 40 years ago in an Arkansas hotel when he was attorney general of the state. She even cites the “contemporaneous evidence” given by Broaddrick’s friends who saw her after the rape crying with a bruised lip. Which makes it hard to understand how she could come to the conclusion that this act wasn’t evil. But she did:

I think you can do something horrible, realize later that it is horrible, be ashamed forever and try to keep it secret and never do it again…

I think Bill Clinton could very well have raped Juanita Broaddrick… it doesn’t make him an evil man, or irredeemable (I’m Catholic; we’re all forgiven, if we’re sorry, and Broaddrick says Bill Clinton personally called her up to apologize). It doesn’t even necessarily make him a bad feminist — you know, later, once he stops doing that.

It doesn’t end there:

I can absolutely see Bill Clinton doing this (then, not now) and not even thinking of it as rape, but thinking of it as dominant, alpha sex. I can see a LOT of men doing that during that time period, before we started telling them in the ’80s, “hey, that is rape, do not do that.” I can see YOUR NICE GRANDPA doing that, back then.

“Rape is about power, not sex.” For those for whom it’s about power, those are the serial rapist guys, and they hate women and want to punish us. But I don’t think that’s in every case. I think good men can rape, and be sorry, and not do it again. This is very bad feminism.

Here’s an easier way to look at it: rape = evil. There. Fixed it.

It’s clear that Broaddrick’s story haunts Hillary Clinton, as well. Soon after Bill’s rape victim posted a reminder of the incident to Twitter in January, it was discovered that the Clinton campaign quietly scrubbed a very important message to sexual assault survivors from its website. The Blaze compares the entries:

September 2015 to February 2016: ‘I want to send a message to every survivor of sexual assault: Don’t let anyone silence your voice. You have a right to be heard. You have the right to be believed, and we’re with you.’

February 2016 to present: ‘I want to send a message to every survivor of sexual assault: Don’t let anyone silence your voice. You have a right to be heard.’

How’s that for feminist logic? Rape isn’t always rape-rape, when the politics are inconvenient, and not every woman has the right to be believed, but only those who aren’t threatening your shot at the presidency.