![\"Gilbert](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2016\/05\/631px-Gilbert_Stuart_Williamstown_Portrait_of_George_Washington.jpg\")
<\/a>(Wikimedia Commons public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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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\u2019s next nominee. \u00a0Why? \u00a0Because the conservative Judge Gorsuch, in replacing the great conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, would merely be continuing the status quo on the Court. \u00a0However, I said, if Trump were to nominate a conservative to replace a liberal (say, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) \u00a0or, as has now actually happened, a moderate (such as, say, Justice Anthony Kennedy), that nomination would decisively change<\/em> the balance of the Court in a conservative direction and would, therefore, be vehemently, fiercely resisted.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n My prediction has been vindicated beyond reasonable dispute.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n And it may now be that Brett Kavanaugh\u2019s nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States is dead \u2014 and that his reputation is destroyed forever, and even, perhaps, that his continued employment as a federal judge is in doubt.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Very possibly.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n But, if so, should<\/em> his life have been ruined in this way?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Christine Blasey Ford\u2019s allegation is, thus far, notably weak and uncorroborated. \u00a0Deborah Ramirez\u2019s accusation, which she herself has doubts about, is even weaker, and also lacks corroboration. \u00a0And now, Michael Avenatti \u2014 the attorney for porn star and Trump paramour Stormy Daniels, a media-savvy publicity hound<\/a> 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<\/a> \u2014 has come forward with a third accuser who (it\u2019s early yet) may well turn out to be the weakest of the three:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMichael Avenatti\u2019s Unbelievable Allegation\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe Absurdities of the Kavanaugh Crisis:\u00a0The credibility of the anti-Kavanaugh forces has been diluted by the latest spate of uncorroborated stories.\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Three independent accusations in a highly polarized and emotional case, ranging from doubtful to extremely dubious, can\u2019t simply be added up to clinch a powerful case.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Every man out there is potentially vulnerable to utter destruction by means of uncorroborated accusations. \u00a0Imagine if someone were to come forward now, years and perhaps decades after you\u2019ve left your adolescence behind, and to accuse you of sexual assault or, say, of grossly racist and hateful remarks. \u00a0Should the accuser simply be believed because of his or her ethnicity or gender? \u00a0Should 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? \u00a0Would corroborating evidence or testimony be superfluous in the face of such a charge?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0Would you, if you\u2019re 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?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Those who are unbothered by attempts to destroy Brett Kavanaugh even if they\u2019re based on uncorroborated allegations of wrongdoing because, after all, he\u2019s a conservative \u2014 or a beneficiary of \u201cwhite privilege\u201d 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\u2019s business, anyway?) \u2014 should at least consider the awesome power of the evil genie that they\u2019re releasing from the bottle.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve said before, the truth about Dr. Ford\u2019s and Ms. Ramirez\u2019s accusations may be publicly unknowable. \u00a0But, as things stand right now, it seems to me that far too many people are casually willing to let a man\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n This is not only wrong, it\u2019s imprudent<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0Having created a monster and unleashed it against their enemy, they\u2019ll have no standing to complain when it turns on them<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve done several times here before, I quote a great passage from Robert Bolt\u2019s great play, A Man for All Seasons<\/em>, centered on Sir Thomas More, who will eventually be executed by order of the mercurial, amoral, and lawless Henry VIII:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n My indignation on this point doesn\u2019t stem merely from the fact that I\u2019m a libertarian-leaning political conservative who thinks that Brett Kavanaugh would make a fine Supreme Court justice. \u00a0I\u2019m upset and I find what\u2019s currently happening to him obscene, but I would feel the same way were the nominee a political liberal. \u00a0(For the record: \u00a0I once literally ran into Al Franken in Reagan National Airport. \u00a0I didn\u2019t support him politically and, had I lived in Minnesota, I would have opposed him. \u00a0But I think that he was driven from the Senate without the investigation that he had asked for and that he deserved. \u00a0I believe strongly in the presumption of innocence and in due process \u2014 even for those with whom I disagree.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I am, perhaps, slightly sensitive on this subject, personally. \u00a0In 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. \u00a0I\u2019ve 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. \u00a0My appearance has been ridiculed. \u00a0IRS records have been combed through to find financial evidence that might be used to make me look bad. \u00a0A 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\u2019d never heard, in a bid to depict me as despising Jews. \u00a0Even a very young son\u2019s Christmas wish list from years ago was extracted from Amazon.com and abused in order to portray me as a bad father. \u00a0I know something of what it\u2019s 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. \u00a0I receive anonymous and often obscene hate mail every week, and often several times a week, and have done so for many years now. \u00a0On two occasions, I\u2019ve had police officers in my house looking at overt threats of violence.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I disapprove, to put it mildly, of this sort of thing. \u00a0I view such viciousness as the devil\u2019s work. \u00a0I do not like to see public reputations lightly and unjustifably destroyed. \u00a0The good name of a man or a woman is not something to trifle with.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I hate what I see happening to our country and to political discourse in our republic. \u00a0This is becoming an intertribal total war, in which opponents are granted no decency whatever and in which it\u2019s considered weakness to show any quarter to an \u201cenemy.\u201d \u00a0My deep distaste for such behavior is one of the reasons I opposed the presidential ambitions of Donald Trump and did not vote for him. \u00a0I hate the coarsening of our culture. \u00a0I begin to think of Nephite society as depicted in 3 Nephi 7<\/a>. \u00a0And I fear that we\u2019re beginning to deserve what happened to the Nephites in the following chapter.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n While I\u2019m at it, though, here is some commentary \u2014 always subject to being rendered obsolete by the next bombshell revelation (or the next pretended<\/em> bombshell revelation):<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cA Judicial Confirmation Hearing Is Not a Trial:\u00a0Kavanaugh\u2019s hearing has become a farce.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe Presumptions of Evil That Cloud the Kavanaugh Debate\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAgainst the \u2018Choir Boy\u2019 Straw Man\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n\n