On the Kavanaugh case, again

When Neil Gorsuch was selected for the United States Supreme Court, I predicted on several occasions that the opposition to him would be nothing compared to the opposition to Trump’s next nominee.  Why?  Because the conservative Judge Gorsuch, in replacing the great conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, would merely be continuing the status quo on the Court.  However, I said, if Trump were to nominate a conservative to replace a liberal (say, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg)  or, as has now actually happened, a moderate (such as, say, Justice Anthony Kennedy), that nomination would decisively change the balance of the Court in a conservative direction and would, therefore, be vehemently, fiercely resisted.

My prediction has been vindicated beyond reasonable dispute.

And it may now be that Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States is dead — and that his reputation is destroyed forever, and even, perhaps, that his continued employment as a federal judge is in doubt.

Very possibly.

But, if so, should his life have been ruined in this way?

Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation is, thus far, notably weak and uncorroborated.  Deborah Ramirez’s accusation, which she herself has doubts about, is even weaker, and also lacks corroboration.  And now, Michael Avenatti — the attorney for porn star and Trump paramour Stormy Daniels, a media-savvy publicity hound ideally suited to the Age of Trump and, like Senator Cory Spartacus Booker (D-NJ) and the lamentable Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), a possible presidential candidate — has come forward with a third accuser who (it’s early yet) may well turn out to be the weakest of the three:

“Michael Avenatti’s Unbelievable Allegation”

“The Absurdities of the Kavanaugh Crisis: The credibility of the anti-Kavanaugh forces has been diluted by the latest spate of uncorroborated stories.”

Three independent accusations in a highly polarized and emotional case, ranging from doubtful to extremely dubious, can’t simply be added up to clinch a powerful case.

Every man out there is potentially vulnerable to utter destruction by means of uncorroborated accusations.  Imagine if someone were to come forward now, years and perhaps decades after you’ve left your adolescence behind, and to accuse you of sexual assault or, say, of grossly racist and hateful remarks.  Should the accuser simply be believed because of his or her ethnicity or gender?  Should you be deemed guilty because, well, some people from your socio-economic class or race or gender have been known to have done such things?  Would corroborating evidence or testimony be superfluous in the face of such a charge?

Every woman out there has either a friend or a son or a brother or a husband or a father whose career, reputation, and life could be totally ruined by such a claim.  Would you, if you’re a woman, be serenely content to have an allegation of this kind simply accepted as true, despite vigorous denials under oath and penalty of perjury and without any supporting evidence?

Those who are unbothered by attempts to destroy Brett Kavanaugh even if they’re based on uncorroborated allegations of wrongdoing because, after all, he’s a conservative — or a beneficiary of “white privilege” or a graduate of Yale or, perish the thought, somebody who claims to have been a virgin well beyond high school (how is this actually anybody else’s business, anyway?) — should at least consider the awesome power of the evil genie that they’re releasing from the bottle.

As I’ve said before, the truth about Dr. Ford’s and Ms. Ramirez’s accusations may be publicly unknowable.  But, as things stand right now, it seems to me that far too many people are casually willing to let a man’s life be largely wrecked and his public reputation marred beyond repair by unproven and indeedly distinctly tenuous claims of what might or might not have happened nearly forty years ago.

This is not only wrong, it’s imprudent.

When and if this weapon, once its power to defeat others has been demonstrated on such a large public scale, is turned against someone that they themselves care about and value, members of the anti-Kavanaugh lynch mob will have only themselves to blame.  Having created a monster and unleashed it against their enemy, they’ll have no standing to complain when it turns on them.

As I’ve done several times here before, I quote a great passage from Robert Bolt’s great play, A Man for All Seasons, centered on Sir Thomas More, who will eventually be executed by order of the mercurial, amoral, and lawless Henry VIII:

Alice More: Arrest him!

More: Why, what has he done?

Margaret More: He’s bad!

More: There is no law against that.

Will Roper: There is! God’s law!

More: Then God can arrest him.

Alice: While you talk, he’s gone!

More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man’s laws, not God’s– and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.

My indignation on this point doesn’t stem merely from the fact that I’m a libertarian-leaning political conservative who thinks that Brett Kavanaugh would make a fine Supreme Court justice.  I’m upset and I find what’s currently happening to him obscene, but I would feel the same way were the nominee a political liberal.  (For the record:  I once literally ran into Al Franken in Reagan National Airport.  I didn’t support him politically and, had I lived in Minnesota, I would have opposed him.  But I think that he was driven from the Senate without the investigation that he had asked for and that he deserved.  I believe strongly in the presumption of innocence and in due process — even for those with whom I disagree.)

I am, perhaps, slightly sensitive on this subject, personally.  In a very much smaller but still quite public way, I myself have been smeared on a weekly if not daily basis for at least a decade, and possibly for more than a decade and a half, rather systematically, by two or three or maybe four anonymous people on the internet.  I’ve been accused, entirely baselessly, of anti-Semitism, fraud, academic incompetence, sadism, racial bigotry, sympathies for fascism, voyeurism, deliberately destroying the careers of others, philistinism, consciously wrecking families, poor literary taste, ignorance, misogyny, mercenary greed, tendencies to violence, malice, and . . . well, the list goes on and on and on.  My appearance has been ridiculed.  IRS records have been combed through to find financial evidence that might be used to make me look bad.  A joke that I made while living in Israel as an unmarried student back in early 1978 was trotted out, having been located on an obscure blog of which I’d never heard, in a bid to depict me as despising Jews.  Even a very young son’s Christmas wish list from years ago was extracted from Amazon.com and abused in order to portray me as a bad father.  I know something of what it’s like to be the target of unjustifiable abuse fundamentally stemming from the public positions I have advocated, pretty much entirely in connection with my religious faith.  I receive anonymous and often obscene hate mail every week, and often several times a week, and have done so for many years now.  On two occasions, I’ve had police officers in my house looking at overt threats of violence.

I disapprove, to put it mildly, of this sort of thing.  I view such viciousness as the devil’s work.  I do not like to see public reputations lightly and unjustifably destroyed.  The good name of a man or a woman is not something to trifle with.

I hate what I see happening to our country and to political discourse in our republic.  This is becoming an intertribal total war, in which opponents are granted no decency whatever and in which it’s considered weakness to show any quarter to an “enemy.”  My deep distaste for such behavior is one of the reasons I opposed the presidential ambitions of Donald Trump and did not vote for him.  I hate the coarsening of our culture.  I begin to think of Nephite society as depicted in 3 Nephi 7.  And I fear that we’re beginning to deserve what happened to the Nephites in the following chapter.

While I’m at it, though, here is some commentary — always subject to being rendered obsolete by the next bombshell revelation (or the next pretended bombshell revelation):

“A Judicial Confirmation Hearing Is Not a Trial: Kavanaugh’s hearing has become a farce.”

“The Presumptions of Evil That Cloud the Kavanaugh Debate”

“Against the ‘Choir Boy’ Straw Man”

“Yale’s ‘Culture of Drinking’”

Please pray for the United States of America.