Republican representative Ralph Norman attempted to tell a joke in his opening statement on Sept. 20 at a debate with democratic candidate Archie Parnell.
Karen Kedrowski, the executive director for the Center for Civic Learning, was the moderator of the debate hosted by the Kiwanis Club. Kedrowski said that she had to “remain as neutral as possible” following Norman’s opening statement.
“Did y’all hear this latest late-breaking news from the Kavanaugh hearings? Ruth Bader Ginsburg came out that she was groped by Abraham Lincoln,” Norman said at the debate on Sept. 20.
Kedrowski said that the entire statement was completely inappropriate and that her job as moderator prevented her from participating in a discussion on the comment.
“In my role as moderator, I was not in a position where I could emote… So, I looked down at my notes and took a drink of water,” Kedrowski said.
She also said that it expressed a level of insensitivity toward women’s struggles with sexual assault and violence.
“It demonstrated an insensitivity to the experiences of women whom have been traumatized by sexual assaults of a wide variety of magnitudes…That is not to trivialize groping, catcalling and all sorts of sexual harassment and sexual assaults, which means that a number of women live in fear,” Kedrowski said.
Both candidates, Norman and Parnell, are running for the 5th District seat in Congress. Norman is the incumbent holder of this seat after Parnell lost in a 2017 special election. Former representative, Mick Mulvaney, joined the Trump administration as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2017.
Kedrowski said that Norman misread the audience and treated it like a standard campaign rally, where supporters would usually be in attendance instead of a more politically-independent audience like the Kiwanis.
“He might have used this line before in more conservative circles, and people were not offended. The audience was not a campaign rally. It was an audience of Kiwanians, and it was an audience that was bipartisan… it may have been an audience he was not as accustomed to speaking to, and he made a mistake,” Kedrowski said.
Comments such as Norman’s are standard in politics, according to Kedrowski. She said that Trent Lott, who lost his leadership in the Senate after he remarked that former South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond should be president of the United States, is an example of a politician using their influence to make controversial statements.
Kedrowski said that these political and social situations are context-dependent, and what may have been acceptable in the past may be considered offensive today.
“It’s not that unusual in certain circles to have jokes that were okay at one point of time are no longer funny in another point in time… At one point, telling someone is very attractive, pleasant and agreeable is now considered trivializing. Social mores and understanding evolve,” Kedrowski said.
She also said that this was not the first time that Norman “misread the audience.” Norman met with constituents in April, Mothers Against Gun Violence, in a public restaurant to discuss gun control legislation following the Parkland shooting incident.
“He pulled out his concealed weapon and put his gun on the table to make the point that the gun is an inanimate object – it’s not going to hurt you unless someone picks it up and shoots it,” Kedrowski said.
She said that the gun could have been a trigger for the women who may have been traumatized by gun violence in the past.
“A hammer is harmless until someone picks it up and uses it to bash someone else’s head in, right? … Again, he misread the audience. He did it in a public place. He had every right to carry his weapon, because he has a permit, but it doesn’t mean it was well-advised… Now, his judgment is being called into question,” Kedrowski said.
According to Kedrowski, honesty, especially when it comes to the “ugly truth,” is preferable than dishonesty during campaigns and political terms, such as the domestic violence records from 1973 that The Post and Courier released about Parnell.
Parnell denied the allegations before the divorce decree was revealed and caused the Democratic National Committee to withdraw funding from his campaign.
“The point is that he lied about it. Now, I understand why he lied about it. It’s an unpleasant truth… But had he told the story himself and told it early, he could have controlled the message. He could have talked about what lessons he learned. he could have done a lot to control the message and undermined his opponent’s ability to use it against him,” Kedrowski said.
