Sex and assault: Two different things

AS YOU'VE NO doubt heard, Newt Gingrich has accused Megyn Kelly of being "fascinated with sex" because the Fox anchor has done shows on the accusations that Donald Trump has cornered, groped and indulged in weird, walk-by grabs of various women he knew barely or not at all.

"You don't care about public policy," Gingrich informed Kelly, just before she told him she hoped he'd get to work on his anger issues, and he wished the same to her.

Maybe the former speaker sees the current discussion as prurient because he's flashing back to his own presidential run four years ago. At the height of his popularity, just ahead of the South Carolina primary, the crowd roared its approval when Gingrich blasted a debate moderator for bringing up reports that he'd asked his second wife to agree to an open marriage.

Now that conversation really was about sex.

But this one is not.

Trump says all of his accusers are lying and may well have been set upon him by the "nasty woman" who's running against and ahead of him in the polls.

But what Gingrich is denying is something different; what he is choosing not to see is that what Kelly - and the campaign, in its final weeks - are focusing on isn't sex at all, but on a crime that we have long ignored and an issue that's very much worthy of an all-out public policy debate.

Which we're now having thanks to Trump, who started this colloquy himself by bringing up accusations that Bill Clinton raped a campaign volunteer, Juanita Broaddrick, in 1978. The former president also settled a sexual harassment suit brought by Paula Jones and was accused of groping Kathleen Willey, whose credibility issues in unrelated matters worked against her.

We're also having this conversation thanks in no small part to Megyn Kelly's former boss, Roger Ailes, who was accused of sexual harassment by, among others, Gretchen Carlson, who won a $20 million settlement from Fox News.

And as we do, you hear Democrats, too, conflating sex and predation; during a recent back-and-forth about Bill Clinton's accusers on "The View," Joy Behar dismissed the notion that the Democratic nominee had enabled her husband or demeaned potential victims. Maybe instead, she said facetiously, Hillary Clinton should have said, "I would like to apologize to those tramps who have slept with my husband."

She later apologized for calling them "tramps," but using that word wasn't the only problem; the three women are either victims or liars, but they aren't former lovers. Contrary to the impression left by the "SNL" skit in which the women Trump invited to the second debate are referred to as Bill Clinton's "mistresses," no one has ever said any of them was in the kind of arguably consensual intimate relationship the president carried on with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Near the close of this free-for-all of a campaign, I have two public policy proposals: First, let's stop selectively confusing sex, which can speak to character issues but is not a crime, and harassment, assault and rape, which are not only wrong but criminal.

We can't do that, though, until we stop trying to pretend this is a partisan issue, arguing endlessly about whether Clinton or Trump is the more serious offender, as if they couldn't both be in the wrong.

Until then, it's so predictable that when Kelly raises this legitimate issue against his candidate, Gingrich simply accuses her of being part of the liberal media. Just as whenever Clinton's history is mentioned, that's reflexively dismissed as a rehash of Republican talking points.

As long as we only talk about violence against women at election time, and even then exclusively as a cudgel to be selectively wielded against political adversaries, then we're not taking it seriously and will solve nothing.

But my second proposal does involve elections: What do you say we never again have a nominee, Republican or Democrat, with this kind of history with women?