In response to “From the Publisher: Change is at our doorstep” published on Sept. 20.
Arnold, I usually have great respect for your opinions, but I vehemently disagree with you about whether the very serious allegations against Brett Kavanaugh are disqualifying if proven true, simply because of his age at the time.
You wrote, “What teenage boy isn’t guilty of some inappropriate behavior?” May I assume that you consider attempted rape to be simply “inappropriate behavior”? May I further assume that you’d be OK if a drunken young man dragged your 15-year-old daughter into a bedroom, pushed her onto the bed, covered her mouth to muffle her screams, and attempted to remove her clothing and grope her as his friend watched? Because, well, boys will be boys?
This alleged “inappropriate behavior” by then 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh was so traumatizing to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that she revealed it to her husband and her therapist only years later. Dr. Ford struggled as an undergraduate, she moved across the country to be out of Kavanaugh’s orbit, and she has told friends that even now she won’t buy a home unless it has two exits from the master bedroom. If a young Brett Kavanaugh had done physical, rather than psychological, harm to 15-year-old Chrissy Blasey—if he had hit her with his car while driving drunk, say, rather than drunkenly assaulted her—would you still consider it to be merely “inappropriate behavior,” irrelevant to his qualifications to sit on the highest court in the land?
And Arnold, you also suggest in your editorial that examining an applicant’s youthful actions for evidence of his or her moral compass could ultimately prove to be as unjustly disqualifying for women as for men. But, I strongly suspect that those self-proclaimed Christians, who are most vocal in the “boys will be boys” defense of Judge Kavanaugh, would refuse to even consider the nomination of an equally qualified woman if they learned she’d had an (entirely legal) abortion as a teenager. In their eyes, that would make her morally unfit for office, no matter the circumstances, no matter her age at the time.
To me, and to many women, Dr. Ford’s accusation rings true. Many of us have used the #MeToo hashtag to share our own stories of sexual harassment and abuse, often for the first time, years after the fact. We know how it feels to be scared, and ashamed, and powerless. Still, I would like to withhold my judgment about Dr. Ford’s claim until a full, impartial investigation of her allegations has been completed, but—whoops—in their unseemly haste to seat Kavanaugh on the high court before the midterm elections, the Republicans in Congress have declined to order one. Instead, Dr. Ford will be grilled by a group of good old boys who have made no secret of their disgust that their slam-dunk nomination has been derailed. In fact, Senator Lindsey Graham has gone on record as saying that he will vote for Kavanaugh’s confirmation no matter what he learns from the Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday. He will almost certainly be joined by his fellow Republicans, who have treated this credible accusation as a mere speed bump on the road to their Holy Grail: a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
Absent a full and impartial investigation of his alleged “inappropriate behavior,” Brett Kavanaugh’s lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court on a party-line vote will forever be tainted, and it will further erode the trust that Americans—particularly women—have in the democratic institutions that are the bedrock of our government. One can only wonder why Kavanaugh himself is not insisting on an FBI investigation to clear his name, since this accusation will otherwise be in the first line of his obituary.
Pam Eilerson