I’ve tried not to engage my nearest and dearest on political subjects lately. It didn’t work out so well when I tried this before (cue image of middle-aged woman banging her head against a brick wall and coming away disoriented and exsanguinating) Still, having been (accidentally?) included in a text-message chain between some friends and family members deploring Kavanaugh, I was provoked into responding. Not in a text-message (c’mon, people: have you ever known me to be brief?) but in a nice, long email (appended below).

Let me know your thoughts…

FIRST:

Far too many people do not appear to understand what a law enforcement background check entails. (Judge Kavanaugh has undergone six of these, conducted by the FBI). 

For example, just to become a Maine State Trooper (not a circuit court judge or anything so exalted) all sorts of people are interviewed, in writing, by phone and/or in person: parents, siblings, spouses, ex-spouses, lovers, ex-lovers (going back to college or even high school) high school teachers, college professors, coaches, drill instructors, landladies, former classmates, former roommates, bosses, co-workers, neighbors, friends, rivals and enemies… And of course, in the past decade or so, the internet is also searched, by people who know what they’re doing, with what are often embarrassing if not disqualifying results.

Investigators take these background checks extremely seriously. (Side note: How sure are you that your past could hold up under such scrutiny?) 

The investigations carried out by the FBI should therefore count as very strong evidence that Kavanaugh is who and what he claims to be. But even without the sixfold imprimatur of the FBI, It would be virtually impossible to make a circle of wagons tight enough to conceal the kind of lurid behavior that Kavanaugh has been accused of. It’s not that it doesn’t exist; rather, when it exists, people know about it. Louche, lascivious or predatory men (alcoholic or otherwise) over time become well-known for being so. Everyone knew about Harvey Weinstein. Everyone knew about Ted Kennedy’s “waitress sandwiches”; everyone knew Bill Clinton didn’t just boast about grabbing women, he actually grabbed them. And raped at least one. 

SECOND: 

Unless we don’t really #believewomen? 

Well? Do we?

Consider the case of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. 

These two young women claimed to have been gang raped on a train.  

The accused were young black men. 

The alleged crime took place in the American South, in 1931, under Jim Crow. 

Once accused, arrested, and jailed, the young men — soon to become famous as the Scottsboro Boys — were threatened with a lynch mob that #believedwomen. The defendants had to be transferred to a different jail for their own protection, and then watched over by the state militia lest the champions of women enact their own merciless and mindless justice. 

The trial of the Scottsboro Boys was obviously unfair; the defense inadequate, the women’s testimony inconsistent and contradictory. Nevertheless, you will be happy to hear that the young men were found guilty. 

Their case was appealed, retried, appealed, and retried. 

The victims testified and endured cross-examination. The defense attorney — can you imagine? — introduced evidence of their promiscuity and poor character. Decades later, Ruby Bates recanted, but Victoria Price never did, insisting as late as 1976 that she had not lied. “I’ve told the truth all the way through, and I’m a gonna go on fighting ‘til my dying day or ’til justice is done.” 

Should we #believe her? How about all the other white women who claimed to have been abused or assaulted by black men during the Jim Crow era? Maybe Emmet Till really did make his female victim feel threatened and marginalized by whistling and ogling? 

Women don’t lie about these things, after all.

Do we #BelieveWomen or selectively believe the ones whose stories fit and support a larger narrative or serve a higher cause? 

It’s not hard to see what the higher cause is in the case of Kavanaugh. Here is a big ol’ hint from the mailing, sent to me by some hero at the Democratic HQ under the hashtag #VOTEPROCHOICE:

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Deborah Ramirez. Julie Swetnick. We believe them. We honor their courage. And we need to support them directly so they can speak their truths until Brett Kavanaugh is defeated, impeached, or indicted.

#VOTEPROCHOICE has been in D.C. all week, engaging in protest and nonviolent civil disobedience as part of a coalition led by the Center for Popular Democracy, Women’s March, and Housing Works.

On Monday, I was arrested (again) outside of Senator Susan Collins’ office; these elected women need to be reminded what’s at stake for all women. 

Which is it? #Believewomen or #VoteProChoice?

Doesn’t our credulity depend on “what is at stake? “

What is at stake in the Kavanaugh Hearing? It’s not retroactive sympathy for the experiences of inebriated girls at 1980s-era keggers, or the lingering trauma thereof. The hashtag, the history, and the rhetoric of the Democrats make it perfectly clear that the Democrats solicitude for and interest in Judge Kavanaugh’s accusers has little or nothing to do with abuses or assaults committed against them in particular or against women more generally.

It has everything to do with the fact that Kavanaugh is (correctly) believed to be a constitutional originalist who may opt to overturn what even Ruth Bader Ginsburg disdained as a lousy bit of jurisprudence. 

Long before Dr. Ford’s allegations landed on Di-Fi’s desk, let alone were made public, the Democrats had already declared themselves hell-bent on defeating Kavanaugh’s appointment by any means necessary. For reasons best known to its collective self, the Democratic Party has decided that nothing matters more than preserving Roe v. Wade. 

Certainly, Dr. Ford doesn’t matter: if Kavanaugh was a progressive, Dr. Ford could have produced actual evidence — a stained blue dress, a corpse in a submerged car, or even a few actual, you know, witnesses — and nonetheless her accusations would never have been allowed to interfere with the career of a Champion of Women’s Rights. Didn’t Democratic Senator Hirono come right out and say it was the fact of Kavanaugh’s being “very much against women’s reproductive choice” that made her believe him capable of attempted rape? 

Had Dr. Ford been a conservative who accused a progressive judge, the accusation would have been ignored. (After all, the #BelieveWomen crowd back in Scottsboro weren’t interested in the rapes of black women, were they?) If #ShePersisted, someone would, by now, be calling her a loony or a stalker and maybe an advisor would crack a joke about “dragging a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park” to explain her true motivations. 

Recall, here, that in an interview during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a feminist, author, TIME magazine contributor, and White House correspondent said, “I would be happy to give [President Clinton] a blow job just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”  By the time of Nina Burleigh’s interview,  numerous women had come forward to accuse Clinton — with evidence and witnesses — of sexual assault and rape, including Juanita Broadrick whose claim was (and remains) far more credible than anything put forth by Ford, Ramirez, or Swetnick. She was not #believed. She was (and is) ignored, dismissed and reviled.   

Cui bono? Why is abortion (on demand and without apology) so important to Feinstein, Hirono, Warren, Schumer and, for that matter, Collins? It could be feminist principle, I suppose. 

I would suspect, however, that their principles are undergirded just a bit by the enormous sums (about $10 million a year for the past five years) that Planned Parenthood has poured into political races — PP’s contributions dwarf those of the National Rifle Association, who are claimed to have Republican lawmakers’ “balls in a vise,” in the charming phrase of  Bill Maher.  

And let us briefly recall that, unlike Planned Parenthood, the NRA is purely an advocacy group; it doesn’t actually sell guns.

Planned Parenthood stands to lose millions should Roe be overturned, and millions more should the question of abortion be returned to the states and a citizenry that has consistently been shown to be far more ambivalent on the issue than either Planned Parenthood or the Democratic Party. 

Whatever the reason for the Democrats’ selective and cynical “outrage,” the results are dismaying. So no, I don’t #believewomen. I don’t believe Diane Feinstein or Kamala Harris, for example, though I do believe all of the women who testified to the good character of Brett Kavanaugh. I believe his wife and daughters, colleagues, the women he mentored and encouraged without expecting Clintonesque favors, and the many, many women who were questioned by FBI agents charged with the intensive investigation of all things Kavanaugh.

As it happens, I find Kavanaugh himself far more believable (not to mention kind and humane) than his accusers but that is completely immaterial to the Democrats. 

I would fervently hope that, should any of our children enter into politics, they never endure (or, God forbid, inflict) a process as hypocritical, destructive, mendacious, mercenary, and just plain mean as this revolting exercise.