Sexual Assault Is a Transmissible Disease, and Donald Trump Is a Carrier

Right-wing trolls are gloating that the #MeToo movement has been discredited by the latest revelation involving Asia Argento. But it just shows that sexual assault is a sexually transmitted disease that infects and spreads from one person to another, like HIV or chlamydia:

The Italian actress and director Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie business to publicly accuse the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. She became a leading figure in the #MeToo movement. Her boyfriend, the culinary television star Anthony Bourdain, eagerly joined the fight.

But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.

It has long been known that child survivors of sex abuse often turn into perpetrators. It's irrelevant whether victims do this because they hurt and want someone else to hurt, or because they think the behavior is normal. It's an evil cycle that should be stopped dead in its tracks.

This news comes on the heels of the revelation that the Catholic Church covered up the sexual abuse of thousands of children in Pennsylvania (which is only one of dozens of such scandals, from Boston to Minnesota to South America).

One priest abusing 10 children doesn't produce just 10 victims. It produces 10 first-order victims, then maybe 20, or 50, or 100 second-order victims when those children commit the same crime against others, and then hundreds more third-order victims as the parents, wives, and children of direct victims are stricken by the terrible anguish when they learn the awful things their loved ones have done, or what has been to their loved ones.

That's why we can't let one groping go unchallenged or one rape unprosecuted.  If their crimes aren't exposed predators continue to assault more victims, spreading the disease, producing more predators and more victims.

Just the other day a man was found guilty of sexually assaulting a sleeping woman (specifically, fondling her vagina) on a Spirit Airlines flight. He now faces life in prison. The number of sexual assaults on planes nearly doubled from 2014 to 2017.

Since Donald Trump explicitly bragged about grabbing women by the pussy you have to wonder: is Trump's election responsible for this specific assault as well as the general increase in these crimes on airplanes?

That's the sort of conclusion conservatives have always jumped to whenever Democrats have done something dodgy. But Trump's Republican and evangelical enablers just sheepishly mumble, "He denies it," when they know full well he did it because he bragged about doing it.

How many women and children are being assaulted right now because Trumpist dickheads think that they should be able to get away with whatever the president does? After all their moralizing about God and morality, Republicans and evangelicals have shown they believe in neither.