Article from Reason by Robby Soave.

I’ve cautioned that we need to be more careful about how we discuss the various accusations of inappropriate touching against former Vice President Joe Biden—some of which have been mischaracterized in the media. (The viral photo of Biden touching the shoulders of Stephanie Carter actually depicts a comforting moment that Carter considered fully consensual.)

But this involves cutting Biden a level of slack that the former vice president was himself unwilling to grant to men accused of impropriety—particularly on college campuses.

As the journalist Emily Yoffe notes in a terrific piece for POLITICO, Biden was at the forefront of the Obama administration’s efforts to compel colleges to adjudicate sexual misconduct under new standards that were horridly unfriendly to the accused. He was a leading spokesperson for the White House mission of changing the culture around consent norms. Yoffe highlights a now quite hypocritical interview he gave to Teen Vogue:

Biden continues to insist that male college students are crude brutes, ever ready to attack their female classmates. In an April 2017 interview in Teen Vogue, he said that when he explains consent to male students, they are astounded: “I’ve had young men on campuses say to me, ‘I’ve never thought of it that way. … As long as she wasn’t screaming and kicking me and yelling help, then it was probably OK.’ It’s not OK. It’s not OK unless she can affirmatively consent.” In that same interview, he explained what he believes consent entails. “We’re trying to let young men understand that without consent, meaning saying, ‘Yes, it is OK to touch me’ … then it is not consent,” he said. Biden also seems to have no recognition that campus encounters can be filled with ambiguity and mixed signals. In an April 2016 speech at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, he mocked the idea that sexual assault allegations might be “complicated,” and told the assembled students that they should “ostracize the abusers” and “make them the pariah on campus.”

Read the entire article at Reason.