Despite leaving the vice presidency on January 21st, former President Barack Obama’s right-hand man, Joe Biden, has been keeping busy. From publicly defending the judicial branch against Donald Trump’s “corrosive” attacks against various federal judges’ decisions to strike down his executive orders, to ridiculing the current administration’s “romance with [Vladimir] Putin,” the retired Delaware politician just can’t keep his comments to himself. And for good reason, as his most recent remarks on his It’s On Us campaign to Teen Vogue demonstrate.
When asked by Tucker Carlson’s favorite publication about why the campaign “doesn’t address sexual assault survivors, but everyone else,” Biden specifically emphasized the role of men in preventing sexual assault. It’s On Us, he argued, wants to “get men involved” and “change the culture” so that anyone who witnesses an attack in progress doesn’t ignore it. Because anyone who does, he argued, is a “coward”:
Look, if you see a brother taking a drunk freshman coed up the stairs to his room and you do nothing, you’re a coward. You are a coward. You have an obligation to step up. You know that she’s not able to give consent.
As important as the role of men is in preventing sexual assault is, however, Biden wasted no time in setting his sights on the Trump White House’s efforts to curb the previous administration’s advancements on the matter. Like Title IX protections previously enhanced and defended by himself and President Obama. Trump revoked bathroom protections for transgender students after Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos quarreled over the matter. The latter apparently didn’t want to scale back as much as Sessions, though she later called Obama’s protections a “huge overreach.”
The Education Secretary’s attitude toward the Title IX enhancements, and the law in general, didn’t sit well with Biden. “It bothers me most if Secretary DeVos is going to really dumb down Title IX enforcement,” he told Teen Vogue. “The real message, the real frightening message you’re going to send out is, our culture says it’s OK”:
Most parents don’t drive away saying, Is she going to do all right in school? Is she academically qualified? Will she show up for class? How well is she going to do? That’s not the conversation going on. The conversation that’s going on is, is she going to be safe? That is an obligation of the school, and Title IX is the vehicle, and when Secretary DeVos by her silence didn’t affirm that rape and sexual assault are forms of sexual discrimination… God, if anything is sexual discrimination, it’s rape and assault. And that’s why schools have an obligation under Title IX to prevent this from happening.
While Biden flat-out called anyone who witnessed a sexual assault in progress and did nothing to stop it a coward, he stopped short of calling DeVos the same. Considering the former vice president’s ire regarding her actions (and lack thereof) on Title IX protections, however, it probably wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to apply the same logic to Trump’s Education Secretary.
(Via Teen Vogue)