I’m having a hard time recalling. In pursuit of nailing Brett Kavanaugh and selling some books, some New York Times reporters have shed any semblance of honesty. You know the story by now: They wrote a teaser article for the paper about an unreported assault on the part of Justice Kavanaugh thirty years ago, neglecting to mention a key detail: the “victim” has no memory of it! That seems like a pretty crucial fact, and it wouldn’t have come to light without Mollie Hemingway blowing the lid off of story.

The authors of this new anti-Kavanaugh book sat down for an interview today, and whoa boy, they likely had no idea what they were signing up for. This is how it was teased:

An elderly priest I knew years ago had an impressive scholarly background in moral theology and philosophy. Despite that wealth of sophisticated moral reference points, he told me even at his advanced age his first consideration in matters of morals and conscience was still whether it was the kind of thing his parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings would do or approve.

His example is very human and normal—in a healthy society. Ideally, each child would have parents who are part of a community of parental peers who inculcate a shared set of reference points that guide us such that we rarely need a formal overlay of explicit rules. We know what is right and wrong by example and intuition. My mother knew that when I hopped on my bike to go off for hours at a time. If I got into mischief that (a) other adults would intervene and that (b) she would hear about it. More importantly, I knew that too.