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Notes -
If we're doing electoral politics culture war, how about the news out of Ohio?
For those not paying too much attention there's a fairly competitive race going on for Ohio governor between Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. On Twitter yesterday Walter Curt, whose biography describes him as the State Director of the Conservative Caucus of Ohio, posted this video. The video features one Donna Arthur, Amy Acton's mother, who says the following:
That's a pretty powerful ad! Getting a candidate's mother to come out against them like that. Acton's campaign had their own response prepared, of course.
Those are some pretty explosive allegations! Perhaps Acton's mother's opinions are not very reliable if Acton was removed from her custody at age 12 and Donna chose her rapist husband over her daughter. As best I can tell, the allegations are true. National Review alleges to have reviewed documents showing one Cledith Arthur was charged with having sexual contact with Acton while married to Donna. Donna has her own criminal history as well, with a conviction for theft by deception and accusations of animal abuse. Interestingly the Huffington Post dug up another 2020 interview with Donna from Operation Rescue. According to that interview:
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It seems to be Donna's own testimony that her husband was arrested for sexual abuse of Action and Donna and her husband skipped town while on bond to avoid any kind of trial.
Journalists naturally reached out to Ramaswamy's campaign for comment, and they said:
On the one hand, it's hard for me to see how one goes forward with the ad above knowing the full story. If the question is to be one of credibility I am not sure I trust Acton's mother, whom she has not spoken with for almost 50 years and who chose her rapist husband over Acton, above Acton herself. Especially if she has her own criminal convictions for specifically fraud-adjacent behavior.
On the other hand, how did you not know this information? As best I can tell it took the National Review and Huffington Post less than a day to get their hands on the primary legal documents detailing the dispute. The campaign's own statement references the 2020 interview, in which Donna admits the sexual abuse allegations and discusses their leaving town ahead of a trial. I guess the hope is voters see the ad but don't dig any further into the situation or context?
Ramasawmy just cannot help himself. He's shown time and time again that he's willing to poke the bear in ways that most politicians have the savvy to avoid. Controversy aside, I did not find this ad convincing. My reaction wasn't "Acton must be a real slimeball for her own mother to speak against her!" Instead, it was immediately apparent to me that this was a perennial family conflict that had been weaponized for the sake of the election, and it looks desperate. I'm not one of those "respectability politics" people, but this is a conspicuously low blow.
It doesn't help that Acton's mother doesn't mention what Acton is a liar about. I don't think it would be a very effective ad to say, "My daughter is a liar - she said she was raped when she was twelve, but she wasn't!" It seems Ramaswamy's camp forgot about the Streisand effect: in trying to avoid addressing the allegations they've just made Acton look more sympathetic and strong, especially to her increasingly mobilized Democratic base.
I mean, purely on priors, claiming to be a sexual abuse victim is statistically correlated with being a pathological liar. Though I suppose that most liars who wrongly claim to be sexual abuse victims will not be able to point to the person they accused fleeing the country. If she was claiming to have been raped by three unrelated men during her childhood and five more in college, and none of the investigations had ever gotten anywhere, that would be very different.
A mother who worked with sexual abuse victims calling her daughter accusing her husband a liar pushes the probability of her daughter being a liar up, but only marginally. Humans are very much willing to believe whatever is the most convenient thing for them to believe, and for plenty "my daughter is a liar" is much easier than "the person I fell in love with is a terrible human being".
For political office, I would prefer someone on whom the priors of being a pathological liar are low, same as I would prefer someone for whom the probability of being a rapist is low. So the ad harms Acton's qualification very marginally.
On the other hand, the decision by his campaign to publish this ad harms Ramaswamy massively. He most certainly did not have more insight into the truth of the claims than the grand jury decades ago.
Even if I could tolerate playing dirty, he played dirty incompetently, getting caught in the crossfire. A savvier candidate would at least have made sure that the ad did not have his fingerprints on it, then released a statement on how horrified his campaign was about the ad, and pledged to investigate who had paid for it.
The mother would also be in a position to understand and judge the claim.
There are lots of things that might make someone lie about such a thing, and if she had an ongoing pattern of lying and exaggerating to get attention or be manipulative, I think the situation would look very similar from the outside. But if people close to her are saying she has this pattern, I tend to default to it being true, simply because they know her.
If the mother was a remotely neutral party, e.g. the daughter had accused her football coach, then I would sure trust her a lot if she said "ok, my daughter claims he raped her, but four weeks ago she was claiming that her English teacher was a cannibal and three months ago that her schoolmate had gunned down a stranger in the woods."
But I expect that about half of the women who are confronted with evidence that their daughters were raped by their romantic partners will react with denial.
The alternative is simply to horrible to contemplate. "My taste in men (or my lack of ability to judge character) resulted in my daughter having her life ruined in my care" is simply not a reality most people could bear facing. If accepting a reality meant one would kill oneself, humans are pretty great at not accepting that reality.
Life with a vindictive lying teenage daughter is not easy, but it beats having a partner who is raping his stepchildren by a country mile. Sure, your neighbors will be wondering how you raised your daughter so wrong, but that is much less of a social death sentence than having them wonder if you were watching while your partner was fucking your daughter.
So her mother claiming her daughter is lying is worth very little, here.
That's the mistake-theory explanation. Women are literally the character-judge gender, so I give them as much a pass for social "I didn't know better" as much as men get a pass for physical "I didn't know better". (Which for reference is "none".)
The conflict-theory explanation from the mother's side is "permitting my boyfriend to fuck my daughter is the cost of retaining a man who isn't otherwise attracted to me". (The social memeplex about this is sufficiently strong that the mother would have to have The (Anti-)Talk with her daughter about it.)
The conflict-theory explanation from the daughter's side is "claiming my mother's boyfriend fucked me will banish him". This is a natural consequence for any society in which the age of adulthood exceeds reality (since "if you don't like it here, just leave" is practiceable for both parties); you can see that in bodycam footage where the parent(s) say "just take him to jail".
Traditionalist-leaning men and feminists already give women sufficient privilege to outright murder their children without ever having to confront the realization that they were bad people (or "all women are essentially retarded angels that could never", to borrow an adjacent turn of phrase).
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