(Patsy Lynch/Rex Features via AP Images) Herman Cain addresses charges of sexual harassment at the National Press Club yesterday. We’ve just inched past the 20-year anniversary of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, which electrified the country and educated employers and employees alike about the newly enshrined civil-rights violation called “sexual harassment.” Now Politico brings us another iteration of the did-he-or-didn’t-he game—this time, about Herman Cain. Here’s what already bothers me about this conversation: It’s all about electoral politics. Will this hurt him with his constituency ? How will Cain play this ? How will it be played by Fox & Friends? Do Iowa primary voters care? Unlike that round 20 years ago, this is not going to be a discussion about sexual harassment. Call me a crank, but I think sexual harassment matters. Let’s recall the origin of the tort. [Insert unforgivably professorial harumph here.] The 1964 Civil Rights Act banned discrimination based on...

Do you remember the big Wal-Mart class-action case alleging that the behemoth retailer systematically discriminated against women, which the Supreme Court tossed out ? (Technically, the SC said the case was too big and the plaintiffs too disparate to be bundled together and tried in a single lawsuit because they all had different situations and complaints). The Court made this flat declaration at the early stage called “motion for summary judgment”—before the plaintiffs had a chance to present the evidence that they had a common complaint. Brad Seligman , the longtime employment lawyer who has been crusading against workplace discrimination for decades, has filed the first of what he says will be a series of regional lawsuits raising the same issues for smaller groups of plaintiffs. Seligman took his winnings in earlier anti-discrimination lawsuits to start the nonprofit Impact Fund, precisely to fund these kinds of cases. Keep your eye on these.

Somehow I married a jock, which puts me in a mixed marriage. I was the English major who scorned the sports crowd; to our clique, jocks were way down there, below, oh, caterpillars. (We didn’t particularly care about what they thought about us.) My wife has made it clear that the jocks felt much the same way about us dorky creative types; when she hears about my college antics, she groans, I can’t believe you were one of those people! Exactly how I feel. In so many ways, we are a very unlikely pair. As in any mixed marriage, my jock and I try our best to accept the other’s incomprehensible culture—and turn to others for understanding. My longtime best friend and I together buy season tickets to performances from the local troupe, the Actors' Shakespeare Project ; we're perfect companions as we analyze and assess performances in detail, analyzing whether this Lear or that stage set compares well with the other one we saw a decade ago. On game nights (which, to my shock, is every night...

When I blogged over at Slate’s XX Factor (now Double X), I grew fond of Rachael Larimore, with whom I agreed to disagree with on almost everything. I am not being sarcastic. Recently, I heard a rabbi talk about the importance of discussing major issues not to convert others—not to win—but to “improve the quality of our disagreements.” I love this concept as a way to improve our public discourse on core political subjects, which are often religious wars in another guise. And so I am going to continue my tradition of disagreeing with Rachael, who recently posted an item titled Pro-Choicers Hate the "What if I Hadn't Been Born" Question. Here's Why. Rachael was responding to Amanda Marcotte’s post about precisely that question . Rachael says that pro-choice arguments rely on the idea that … women should be allowed to abort their unplanned pregnancies because unwanted children grow up poor, neglected, abused or some combination thereof. It can’t allow for the possibility that some “...

In the wake of a fierce and sustained campaign by feminist groups, the FBI is incrementally moving toward an updated definition of rape. The old one, written in 1929, leaves out a lot of what most of us consider to be rape. Here's how Erica Goode in The New York Times wrote up the controversy: The definition of rape used by the F.B.I. — “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will” — was written more than 80 years ago. The yearly report on violent crime, which uses data provided voluntarily by the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies, is widely cited as an indicator of national crime trends. But that definition, critics say, does not take into account sexual-assault cases that involve anal or oral penetration or penetration with an object, cases where the victims were drugged or under the influence of alcohol or cases with male victims. As a result, many sexual assaults are not counted as rapes in the yearly federal accounting. This week, an FBI subcommittee...

In Vermont, the governor has nominated Beth Robinson to take a seat the state's Supreme Court. Robinson was the prime mover behind the state's Freedom to Marry movement, and one of three lawyers who brought the groundbreaking state case Baker v. Vermont back in the 1990s. That case led to the state's then-groundbreaking civil unions—and spurred a national uproar about the imminent descent of locusts, plague, and so forth. Robinson led the movement to hold that victory statewide, and then to upgrade it to full marriage rights a few years after Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to offer full equality. Like Mary Bonauto , the GLAD lawyer who's been the architect of New England's steady sweep of marriage wins (and whose carefully targeted lawsuits will be critical in dismantling DOMA), Beth Robinson has mostly ducked publicity. Here's a good profile of Robinson. She's one of the hardworking heroes around the country who've made full LGBT equality seem inevitable—and is...