Editors at National Review Online ponder the current controversy involving Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
We do not know whether the accusations that Tara Reade has leveled against Joe Biden are true or false. That is a question of evidence and of inquiry that might be answered as time rolls on. We do know, by contrast, that the double standard that has been exhibited by Biden’s campaign and by the political press in tandem is a national disgrace. Both culturally and legally, due process must be habitually applied to nobody or to everyone. If, upon the most frivolous and protean of pretexts, it is routinely accorded to one faction while being denied to another, it is effectively lost.
Though he has not deigned to address it directly, Joe Biden insists that he is innocent of the charge that he digitally penetrated an intern back in 1993. … If so, we hope that this incident has taught Biden that his previous approach toward accusations of sexual assault was dangerous, illiberal, and ultimately untenable. During the summer of 2018, with Brett Kavanaugh under the national spotlight, Biden was unequivocal in his demand that Americans must believe women as a matter of unwavering reflex. “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally,” Biden argued, “you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time.”
Biden took a similar line when, as Barack Obama’s vice president, he was tasked with overhauling the manner in which sexual assault cases were evaluated on college campuses. Per the Chronicle of Higher Education, “the sweeping Title IX changes that have transformed higher education would not have happened without Biden’s support.”
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