Greg points out that hazing in the Lege can go too far. Way tooooo far….
Not funny and damn demeaning. If Dawn Clark Netsch was around she wouldn’t have ruled it just out of order, she’d have kicked Hendon’s ass. Mark Rhoads makes a very good point in Greg’s post. I don’t mind a bit of silliness, but treating women legislators as sex objects is so far over the line of acceptable behavior, I’ll stop trying to complain about it before I end up writing a string of cliches.
Can’t find it now (no longer in Google cache) but the right-wingers made a few comments about Axley’s looks a while back in the now-defunct Illinois Leader discussion boards. They more along the lines of “She’s a good sight easier on the eyes than __insert crusty ol’ conservative guy here__” … not nearly as crass as Hendon.
(I think it came up in a thread about replacing then-State Sen Dave Sullivan. Can’t recall specifically.)
And not to minimize that, but my expectation of a State Senator is at least, just slightly higher than behavior on the Leader bulletin board.
If the Senate is going to do something studid, can we at least have a good fist fight?
Rich Miller makes a good point: does this have more to do with race than the actual comments themselves?
(Which led me to wonder if it boils down to cynical election year politicking and media manipulation… Democrat Dan Kotowski got a good boost of name recognition and a proven ground game in the 33rd thanks to the primary while Axley was reduced to tagging along at GOP events since she was unopposed in her primary.)
I don’t doubt that Hendon’s race helped the story take off, but think about that behavior in any other professional setting. It’s a lawsuit and mandatory sexual harassment training for everyone. So, yeah, I think race made the matter worse, but even if a white guy said it, it’s still inappropriate.
I wasn’t defending Hendon. I was pointing out the right’s hypocrisy.
Hendon says sorry.
If anyone made race-based “jokes” of that caliber about Hendon, he would scream like a stuck pig.