Will the #MeToo movement proclaim another fatality with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh at the center of a sexual misconduct allegation?
Since the #MeToo inquisition began, it has claimed the professional lives of politicians, business tycoons, media celebrities and a plethora of Hollywood sybarites. The charges have ranged from clearly legitimate grievances that need to be satisfied in court to shadowy suggestions of impropriety.
But the new Puritans have yet to carve the scarlet letter on a judge and you just had to know that Kavanaugh — a social conservative selected by President Donald Trump to tilt the political scale of the Supreme Court — had to be the first.
We have heard little from the complainant in this case; she doesn’t even want to come to Washington to tell her story to a waiting world. So it’s less of a #MeToo manifestation than it is a #YouToo moment for Kavanaugh.
On Friday, President Trump tweeted what so many of us would have liked to say: “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place.”
It is moments like these that one is reminded — no matter what remonstrances might exist to his tariffs and trade policy or his private peccadilloes — just why Trump is in the White House. So many people wanted a man who would just throw away the talking points and level with us. Despite two years of being hammered by the mainstream media not only in the U.S. but around the world, Trump continues to be true to form, saying things in public that presidents haven’t been allowed to say since Lyndon Johnson was president.
But Trump really raises the most pertinent point in this matter and the weakest link in the #MeToo crusade. Very few sexual misconduct allegations against prominent men ever reach the legal stage, either because the acts involved are only questionably illegal or because the accuser is satisfied with the man’s career being left in tatters.
In Canada, where male politicians live in daily fear of being accused of having done something untoward at some point in their lives, the leader of the quasi-socialist New Democratic Party actually said that women always have to be believed. He recently kicked one of his own Members of Parliament out of the party caucus based on allegations that the accused stood too close to women at receptions.
But here’s the other salient point when considering whether Kavanaugh is a worthy candidate to sit on the Supreme Court. The incident in question, whether you think it highschool hijinks or unqualified sexual misconduct, occurred so long ago that it really has no bearing on the character of who Kavanaugh is today, what he has learned and experienced in the last 35 years and how he has grown from his mistakes.
Instead, an allegation from the past can somehow consume the achievements and laurels that someone has accreted over decades of his life. That is not only unfair; it is inaccurate and unjust.
The Democrats certainly don’t want Kavanaugh to sit on the Supreme Court. They have made that clear. But let them assess his abilities and accomplishments as they are today and not as they might have been as his adult life was just beginning.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
