Columns—Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas at our Wedding

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Remembering a wedding
and a (continuing) national trial

By Ted Pease
©1997

Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas came to our wedding.

It was an intimate affair, as they say, at a small Vermont inn on an island in the middle of Lake Champlain, 17 years ago today.

It had snowed that morning, then turned to rain, so the skies were gray. Everything else was wet and slushy. Except inside Shore Acres Inn, where Brenda finally made an honest man of me.

There were just seven of us: My sister and her boyfriend were there from Maine. The justice of the peace was the innkeeper/bartender who took off his gloves and Minnesota Twins hat, put down a squash and did the deed. The dogs wanted to come, but they were muddy. Then there was Brenda and me. And in the ether, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill were there, too.

Hill, a law professor from Oklahoma, was accusing Thomas, a Supreme Court nominee, of sexually harassing her when he was her boss at the EEOC. They weren’t really at our wedding, of course, but they were very much present. Come to think of it, so were Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio, and the entire Senate Judiciary Committee.

I am the first to admit that I’m terrible with dates—I have been known to forget my own birthday. It’s not that finally getting Brenda to marry me isn’t the most important event in my life, but without Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, I probably would have a hard time remembering Oct. 12, 1991.

Sexual harassment is not something most of us associate with our wedding anniversary. At least I hope not. But engraved in my memory of the day I got married are the images and sounds of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the voices of now-Justice Thomas, Senators Biden and Kennedy, Specter, Hatch and Simpson, and — most of all — that of a courageous and doomed junior law professor from Oklahoma.

The Hill-Thomas hearings reemerge every time we observe our wedding anniversary.

From Washington came a flurry of live, primetime televised hearings by the all-male, all-white members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a black man nominated by then-President George H. W. Bush to the Supreme Court. A “high-tech lynching” was what Thomas called it, invoking race while deflecting questions over both his qualifications and his conduct.

That morning (Columbus Day, a national holiday honoring a white man who “discovered” America and helped eradicate the native peoples already living here — but that’s another tale), the Thomas hearings were live on TV and radio as we ate breakfast and dressed for our wedding. Distracted by both unfolding dramas, we didn’t talk much; same for many Americans, I guess, 60 percent of whom told pollsters they watched the hearings “closely.”

The story was riveting, and continued on the car radio as we drove to the wedding. When we got there, the innkeeper/JP greeted us at the woodpile, where he’d been chopping kindling. He had headphones in his ears and the Walkman tuned to the same National Public Radio station, which also was on inside, with Sen. Arlen Specter brutally cross-examining Anita Hill as we got ready. They turned off the radio while we got married, but it came back on afterward, amid congratulations, photos, brunch. On the 60-mile drive to Montreal, we held hands, and listened more. High above downtown Montreal, in the honeymoon suite of the grand old hotel le Reine Elizabeth, we opened champagne, put on the fluffy bathrobes, and turned on CNN.

So it is that Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill will forever be part of how I remember my wedding.

A lot of important things happened that weekend, 17 years ago now, and we’re still living with most of them. For me, the most important was marrying Brenda, obviously—a glorious thing. And for all women and men in America, the events surrounding Clarence Thomas’ confirmation to serve a life term on the U.S. Supreme Court still resonate.

Anita Hill put her life—and Clarence Thomas’s—on the line. She didn’t win that fight, but she also didn’t lose: As a result of what she began, women and men across the nation began an uncomfortable but important process of reviewing issues of sexual harassment and sexual power that have been open secrets for too long. One long-term result is the current series of courts martial in the military, where 70 percent of female officers and enlisted have said they have been sexually harassed. Another was a booming commerce in gender books, new life to authors such as Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia, Susan Faludi, Robert Bly and Deborah Tannen, all cashing in on how men and women relate with themselves and each other.

Ironically perhaps, the Hill-Thomas hearings ushered in 1992, called “The Year of the Woman.” In an interview that year, journalist-cum-TV producer Linda Ellerbe told me that she thought three women—Anita Hill, along with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton and Murphy Brown, the TV character who had a well-publicized squabble with Vice President Dan Quayle—had helped start a process that “forced people to rethink their attitudes toward women.” More importantly, Ellerbe said, they “caused women to rethink how we see ourselves.”

“Each of those women,” Ellerbe said, “has through the mass media moved us an inch here or a couple of inches there. Mainly, they did it by being women without apology.”

Today, 17 years after her part in what may have been the most important political dispute between the sexes since suffrage, Anita Hill remains a woman without anything to apologize for. In her book, as in her testimony 17 years ago this weekend, Hill calmly and directly speaks truth to those in power, a courageous example to the rest of us.

Anita, thanks again for the wedding gift. Brenda sends her best.

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This column ran in the Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal in 1997. ©Ted Pease