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The club is closing

12/15/2017, 7:42 a.m.

Note to the ol’ boys: The club is closing.

We’re talking about the club whose members are being outed daily for their reprehensible behavior of sexually harassing and assaulting women.

No longer are the “fresh” comments acceptable, the vile suggestions like those of President Trump that a woman senator would do anything for money; the surreptitious and blatant touches of a co-worker’s, constituent’s or student’s body; or the suggestions — or actual demands — for sexual favors in exchange for keeping one’s job, advancing within a company or getting a good grade.

Those days are over.

If the ol’ boys haven’t gotten that message from the #MeToo movement and the firings and resignations of everyone from television journalists Matt Lauer, Bill O’Reilly and Charlie Rose to music mogul Russell Simmons and Michigan Congressman John Conyers and Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, then perhaps they heard it loudly and clearly from the Alabama voters on Tuesday night who stated that Republican Roy Moore is not the kind of man they want to represent them in the U.S. Senate.

Several women came forward and said that Mr. Moore, while a 30-something attorney in the local prosecutor’s office, had made sexual advances toward them when they were teenagers, including one who was 14 at the time. One woman accused him of sexual assault.

Mr. Moore, a 70-year-old former chief justice on the Alabama Supreme Court, denied the allegations, even as he had people using dubious interpretations of the Bible to support him. (“Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter,” said Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler in defending Mr. Moore.)

Instead, voters elected 63-year-old attorney Doug Jones, the Democratic long-shot candidate, who said he would bring integrity back to Alabama.

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Mr. Jones summoned the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“As Dr. King liked to quote, ‘The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice,’ ” he told the crowd. “Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, tonight in this time, in this place, you helped bend that moral arc a little closer to that justice, and you did it. Not only was it bent more, not only was its aim truer, but you sent it right through the heart of the great state of Alabama in doing so.”

We believe the election shows the nation’s psyche has grown up, and with it expectations that boundaries of human decency and respect will be just that — respected.

Older generations and even younger men no longer can do or take what they want from women and then claim, pitifully and ignorantly, that they mistakenly believed they were “pursuing shared feelings.”

We laud the brave women who are coming forward and telling their stories, many after years of hiding the truth for various reasons. Some women did not come forward before out of their own shame and fears of retribution, of losing their job or of not being believed. 

Others never spoke about being sexually harassed or assaulted because they didn’t want to be responsible for bringing down an icon or destroying a pillar of the community. Others stayed silent for fears of damaging a family — their own or the perpetrator’s wife and children.

But silence has amounted to protecting the guilty. And many offenders continued their patterns of sexual harassment, abuse, assault and even rape.

By standing up and stating what has happened to them, women have gained the personal strength and public support to say, “Enough is enough. We’re not going to take it anymore.”

Younger women now don’t have to live with the bogus rationales “boys will be boys” or “men are men” that seek to dismiss disrespectful and aberrant behavior. They will feel safe and empowered if they encounter any such episodes in the future. 

To the crinkly skinned octogenarians who want to parade around naked, to the younger pervs who drop trou and seek to bend a woman over a desk and take advantage of her, the club is closed. The “casting couch,” viewed by some as a cultural norm in the past, has been taken to the dump.

That also goes for President Trump, who has gleefully boasted that he can simply start kissing a woman or grab a woman by her private parts because “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

On Tuesday, more than 100 members of Congress, including nearly 60 women, signed a letter calling for an investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations several women have leveled against the president. 

At least six members of Congress, including New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden of Oregon and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have called on President Trump to resign.

We believe he should resign as well.

It’s time that we completely shut the door on the ol’ boy club that regarded such vile, reprehensible behavior as OK — because it’s not.

Once we close the door and lock it, we all will be stronger for it.