Roy Moore may be accused of having sexually molested as many as eight teenage girls back in the 80s, but he didn’t molest millions of other teenage girls, so that makes everything OK, a spokesperson told CNN on Tuesday.
As HuffPost reports, Moore spokesperson Jane Porter stopped by CNN on Tuesday to talk with Poppy Harlow about the allegations faced by the Alabama Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. Porter’s defense of her boss is a little flimsy, to say the least.
“We need to make it clear, there’s a group of non-accusers, that have not accused the judge of anything illegal.”
Well, that settles the matter once and for all, doesn’t it? Although some eight women have accused Moore of sexual misconduct, several million others haven’t. So clearly the allegations don’t matter.
Just how many women were teenagers in Alabama in the 80s and didn’t get molested by Roy Moore? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of Alabama around the time Moore was allegedly cruising malls and asking teenage girls on dates was 4 million, give or take. Also according to the Census, about 24 percent of the U.S. population is under 18, and roughly half of them are female. Some quick math reveals that there would have been roughly 500,000 teenage girls in Alabama at any time during the 1980’s. And 499,992 of them haven’t accused Moore of doing anything inappropriate.
So that settles the matter: Roy Moore may have done something horrible, but half a million other people didn’t accuse him of doing something horrible, so it all balances out.
Woman who says she dated Roy Moore as a teen offers new proofhttps://t.co/SZo3lM8ijf pic.twitter.com/ccpR2LKfOP
— VICE News (@vicenews) December 5, 2017
If you think that defense is ridiculous, that’s because you’re right — it is ridiculous. And you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that way. New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait, tongue planted firmly in cheek, broke down Porter’s defense of her boss.
“The biased liberal news media has focused enormous attention on women who claim to have been hit on (or worse) as teenagers by Roy Moore, excavating their evidence in grim detail. (‘That’s the age I was when I dated Roy Moore, because my braces were off,’ one woman tells the Washington Post, revisiting her yearbook that Moore signed.) Yet these one-sided accounts fail to give equal attention to a far larger group: women who made it through their teenage years without Roy Moore trying to get into their pants.”
This new @mccrummenWaPo story is devastating to Roy Moore’s main defense: that the signature on Beverly Nelson’s yearbook is fake. Compare it to this not to Debbie Gibson. https://t.co/cLLu9jP3Xz pic.twitter.com/ddCtdFIvnP
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) December 4, 2017
The Moore accusations have put the GOP in a rather precarious position. On the one hand, the party is desperate to maintain its razor-thin majority in the Senate, and they need Moore to fill a seat that would otherwise be filled by a Democrat. On the other hand, backing someone facing credible allegations of sexual impropriety with teenage girls is a tough line to maintain.
Morality aside, Republicans — some of whom have publicly called for Moore to step down — are doubling down on their guy. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, for example, had called on Moore to step down, but backpedaled recently and said that it should be up to the voters of Alabama to decide Moore’s fate. Similarly, Donald Trump, initially reluctant to throw his support behind Moore, officially endorsed him.
Of course, now that it’s come out that Moore didn’t molest at least half a million other teenage girls, there’s no reason Republicans shouldn’t endorse him.