All Accusations Must Lead to Punishment

So, here's the problem:

In an interview with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press Sunday, Pelosi declared a “zero-tolerance” policy on sexual harassment. Then she stood by Michigan Rep. John Conyers — a powerful Democrat who, it was recently reported, quietly settled a wrongful dismissal case in 2015 when a woman on his staff said she was fired for refusing his repeated sexual advances. Conyers maintains his innocence.

Pelosi could have rattled off a set of meaningless prepared sentences to fill air and buy her party time to figure out what to do. She did telegraph repeatedly in the interview that she expected Conyers to “do the right thing.” Shortly after the interview aired, Conyers announced he would step down from his powerful position as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee — a decision that would be very difficult if not impossible to reverse. Losing such a key position is a bad sign for anyone who hopes Conyers will survive in the House.

Pelosi has, in the past, worked to push out members involved in inappropriate behavior. But in public, on a popular Sunday show, she ran through a list of excuses for Conyers that are the very reasons women are afraid to come forward and report sexual harassment in the first place.

This argument is prefaced with a personal anecdote:

I was very young when I told my boss that a colleague had showed me a video of himself in his underwear at my desk, how he called my cellphone late at night drunk, and how he turned up at my front door one night. When he asked me to meet his parents, I told her, enough is enough.

My boss groaned. That’s bad, she agreed. Then she told me how to handle it: “You can’t just reject him like a normal man,” she warned. “Just stop by his house for one round of drinks with the parents.”

It was a punch to the gut. The woman I saw as a role model, an advocate, and, frankly, a feminist encouraged me to accommodate him, instead of telling him to back off. My colleague’s behavior was an annoyance. My boss’s behavior was a betrayal.

Or it was a lesson that the world is not arranged to protect you, and sometimes you have to stand up for yourself by yourself?  I've had my share of bad bosses and while I've never been sexually harassed, nor do I condone such behavior, I quickly learned the universe was not organized to give me the justice I desired.  Did Nancy Pelosi betray "millions of women" because she didn't demand John Conyers' resign from Congress over a settled allegation of sexual harassment by a former staffer, especially in the light of Conyers' staffers who all say he's been a gentleman to them?  Are all those women dupes of the system, betrayers of the sisterhood, traitors to the accuser who must be believed even though we don't know what the accusations actually are, or who made them?

Frankly, if this is the argument being put forth post-Trump and post-Weinstein, the whole situation is going to devolve quickly into a stew of allegations and accusations that don't produce justice, just backlash.  The arguments are rapidly becoming not about correction and solution, but about purity and punishment.

That direction lies madness and failure.