A Nebraska lawmaker implored the Legislature’s Executive Board on Thursday to hold a colleague accountable for invoking her name in a graphic reading on the legislative floor, which some say constitutes sexual harassment.
The decision of whether Republican state Sen. Steve Halloran will face a censure vote of the full Legislature now rests with a group of their colleagues who are mostly men.
“If we don’t move this forward, we are in fact condoning this kind of speech,” Democratic state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh said at a hearing on her resolution. “This has traumatized the public. It has traumatized my family.”
The Executive Board consists of eight men and one woman. All but one are Republican in the officially nonpartisan Nebraska Legislature.
I was employed at a company where the boss harassed his assistant. All but one of the 14 (exclusively male) employees quit their jobs when we found out.
We’re not all stoic morons free of empathy.
Edit: I kind of forgot what I wanted to say. Not all men behave like a pack of predators. If they do, it’s their choice, not their nature. Which makes it even worse.
Yeah, it’s not a comment on your chromosomes. It’s about power: who wields it, on whose behalf.
This week, Halloran was accused of joking privately with other lawmakers inside the legislative chamber that Machaela Cavanaugh likes to view pornography. Speaker of the Legislature Sen. John Arch — who is a member of the Executive Board — confirmed to The Associated Press on Thursday that he confronted Halloran about those remarks and that Halloran acknowledged he had made them.
This guy desperately needs some sensitivity training.
A vote to censure Halloran would only repudiate his remarks and have no effect on his ability to legislate, speak during debate or serve on legislative committees.
So it’s effectively toothless. There are no serious repercussions then to being censured.
An official declaration saying he crossed the line seems appropriate though.
If there’s that little bite, he should also have to provide an apology for the record.
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having read that book when it came out, I don’t recall any details except an impression of it being pretty harrowing
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