I am really surprised that anyone is surprised. One commentator, a woman named Erin Duffy, put it this way:
This kind of thinking might be fine within the confines of a marriage or purely social situations, but quickly becomes problematic in a place of business because it assigns ulterior motives to women whose actual motivations are probably quite clear: I want to be heard. I want to work hard. I want to be respected. And I want the same exposure and access to my boss that my male counterparts have. That’s it. Admitting discomfort in having a woman sit across a dinner table suggests that we want something more than that. It shifts the blame for extra-marital affairs, or even lapses in judgment squarely onto the women’s shoulders. “I will never stray as long as you aren’t around to entice me to stray,” is more than just a little ridiculous. –
That particular writer also (I think fairly) made this particular point:
*Now let’s imagine a world where a woman in a leadership position espoused similar attitudes. The criticism would be fervent and, in my opinion, obvious: She can’t handle the pressure. She’s so ineffective that she can’t even manage to have a cocktail with a male underling. She’s out of touch with what’s going on within her group. She’s weak. Or, the other option: Her husband controls her. She can’t even exert herself at home, so how can she possibly exert herself in the office? She’s a liability. She’s weak.
The same moral rigidity that allows Pence to wield this argument isn’t available to women in power. It’s simply not something we could ever get away with. We are expected to prove our competency by handling ourselves in all company, in all situations, no matter the time of day. Not to mention the fact that if a woman in a managerial position ever tried to ban meals with members of the opposite sex, she’d eat an awful lot of salads at her desk alone.*
What if Pence did not have any one-on-one meals with anybody, male or female, because he did not want to develop any friendships that might be at odds with his marriage–that is, that will keep him both from forming an inappropriate friendship with a woman and from making a friendship with a man who might use the friendship to lure him into somewhat different inappropriate things?
In other words, before you decide someone has no right to be angry, you might listen to why it is they are angry.
Let us also remember, by the way, that there were similar rules in place governing the meetings of decent men and decent women in Our Lord’s time. Those rules forbade the encounter we know as the story of the Samaritan Woman at the Well, and would have been behind the murmuring at another incident, the incident at which Our Lord’s host, the Pharisee named Simon, said, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, that she is a sinner.” (Lk 7:39) Let’s not be so arrogant as to assume that those people living long ago had worse reasons than we would have for this kind of rules.
Mostly, though, remember that Pence’s case is not like that of Billy Graham, who used the rule in a pastoral setting where those seeking to meet with him were looking for very personal and emotional interventions and were often very emotionally vulnerable. Pence is not a pastor. He is a powerful man and access to him is access to political power. While there are women who would rather not be left alone with a man who has become accustomed to being in a position of power, the reason is not because the powerful man is vulnerable to them. If the man’s wife doesn’t like leaving other women alone with him, that’s not a good sign.
