It’s just locker room talk.

That was Donald Trump’s response to tapes released last Friday that had the Republican nominee for President saying that sometimes you have to just grab women by their private parts and kiss them. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani defended the remarks saying that men, at times, talk like this.

Is it really how men talk? My brother-in-law, who is a war veteran doesn’t talk like that. My father never spoke that way. I never heard that kind of talk from any man in my family ever.
Yet there’s no denying there is a culture of a brusque, crass, you-don’t-count sort of country club or locker room way of speaking that some men engage in.

I know I heard comments from that section of people when I was growing up as the only black kid in my all-white school. I heard it later in life when I was the only gay guy in sports locker rooms, too. All of it was delivered with the same tongue-in-cheek macho jock arrogance we have seen out of Trump throughout this campaign.

Some voters are parents who face the daunting task of explaining Trump’s locker room values to children. Many people I know use the news or the President of the United States for quick examples to help fine tune their kids’ moral compass. Most parents perhaps figured they could use Clinton’s emails or Trump University scams as examples for being more honest and showing integrity.

But grab them by their privates? Lust after my daughter? I’ve had threesomes? A lot of people don’t even know how to broach those topics in a family setting.

I had the task of having this discussion not with a child, but another adult named Jeremy. What made this conversation so compelling is that Jeremy is currently incarcerated at a facility in Mauston, called Sand Ridge. Sand Ridge is a facility for sexually violent offenders. Jeremy has been incarcerated since he was 17 years old and is committed indefinitely to that facility while he takes a rehabilitation program that might possibly lead to his release one day.

He brought up the audio tapes of Trump’s comments. He spoke eloquently about how empathy and proper manner of speaking about women and children was central to the type of therapy being executed at that facility. The men there are expected to never speak that way about women or anyone else. Learning how their words reflect the beliefs that led to their crimes is a big deal there.

He told me that every single guy there was repulsed by Trump’s comments and by the overall tone of this election. He told me how hard he was working to learn the type of empathy and compassion that the rest of us just take for granted. He said he’d never, ever speak about a woman or girl that way.

I can’t put into words what that means. Men who are incarcerated for sexually violent crimes are repulsed by the words of Donald Trump. Jeremy told me that Donald Trump’s words would result in termination from a prison based program. Yet he is running for President of the United States and still has supporters willing to vote for him.

It seems that Trump has spent much time in country clubs and elite gated communities where old white men engage in this sort of talk. Women should know their place. Mexicans are taking all the jobs. Blacks should be grateful for all that they receive. Muslims should be banned.

It all comes down to one thing: deciding who matters and who doesn’t. Trump summed it up best at the first debate when he responded to criticism of his calling women dogs as it only being about Rosie O’Donnell and who cares about her?

Trump took her and every other woman the entire nation has now heard him discuss and made them not count. Being a leader or the President isn’t about having a bunch of power. It’s about seeing people’s lives and wanting to fight to make them better. It’s about everyone counting and working hard on behalf of them because they matter.

Trump is right when he says that guys in the locker room talk like this all the time. But those guys have a long way to go before they can be considered men.