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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Westneat: Zero tolerance rules out due process

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No, Democrats, Rep. Matt Manweller shouldn’t resign. At least not yet.

And no, Democrats, Sen. Al Franken shouldn’t have been cornered into announcing his resignation, either. Not until an ethics committee had a chance to vet the allegations against him.

“Candidates & electeds who have engaged in sexual misconduct must step aside — that’s Dem values,” the Democratic state party chairperson, Tina Podlowski, tweeted about both Manweller, R-Ellensburg, and Franken, D-Minn.

“We must commit to zero tolerance — which is where I believe we as a country and Congress should be,” a Democratic senator, Heidi Heitkamp, of North Dakota, said when calling on Franken to resign.

In no way in this column do I intend to defend the creepy Franken or the slithering Manweller. But having a policy of zero tolerance is usually a terrible idea.

I first ran into this concept in the school system, when a kid I knew got suspended for a week for throwing a jelly bean. Zero tolerance, the school explained. Later I wrote about the ludicrous case of a Yakima kindergartner who was expelled for pointing his fingers like a gun and making pow-pow sounds.

With mounting evidence that zero tolerance doesn’t work, many schools have dropped it. The problem is that it treats every transgression the same. But humans aren’t robots.

Let’s hear everyone out

Take Franken. Apparently he gets handsy and kissy during photo shoots and still makes juvenile dirty jokes like in that posed photo. It’s behavior any adult ought to know is unacceptable. But it is nowhere near the same league of offensiveness, or possible criminality, as sexually molesting a 14-year-old girl, as Alabama’s Roy Moore is alleged to have done.

Or take Manweller. Based on the allegations alone, he sits somewhere between Franken and Moore on the odious-man scale. He’s been investigated twice for allegedly hitting on students and asking them invasive sexual questions at Central Washington University, where he’s on the faculty. But the school did not do any more than reprimand him and ask him to go to training. In fact, eventually the school promoted him.

Yet without asking any further questions or even looking into whether Manweller has had problems in the Legislature, leading Democrats such as House Majority Leader Pat Sullivan, D-Covington, instead jumped straight to: resign.

So where is the moral high ground? It isn’t to purge everyone from public life who is accused of sexual harassment. It’s to take the allegations seriously by hearing them out — specifically, by convening oversight hearings or full-fledged ethics investigations.

This approach honors the victims, who get to air their experiences under oath where hopefully they’ll be taken seriously. And it respects that not all sins are the same, so neither should be the punishments.

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