The Professor And The Judge

In the fast-moving matter of Christine Blasey Ford v. Brett Kavanaugh in the courtroom of public opinion … For the benefit of our exhausted, battered country, may I suggest that it would behoove us all to inhale a deep breath, take a big step back, and all get down off of our respective soap boxes on the opinionated sidelines of this divide. Our knee-jerk instinct is either: pronouncing Judge Kavanaugh guilty of being a dangerously evil predator rapist while proclaiming the sainthood of Professor Ford’s timely story; or conversely affirming Judge Kavanaugh to be a pillar of model character while judging Professor Ford to be a seeker of headline publicity regarding a decades-old fabricated story. Neither premature opinion is helpful to anyone.

Currently, we are all spectators and speculators to this controversy, at best. An objective and impartial investigation is clearly needed. It should be expeditiously effected, but without artificial time deadlines that would cast doubt on the perception of fairness, thereby tainting the Court for years to come. A responsive process is hopefully being set up, ideally with that rarest of things – bipartisan political support – guiding that effort non-politically (versus the painful Anita Hill / Clarence Thomas politicized confrontation of 1991). We need to give such a process a chance to work, and let the details of these conflicting stories be sorted out one step at a time, without prejudice. And then we can draw our conclusions when and as appropriate, such conclusions likely to be difficult to come by. That is (or used to be) the American Way.

And to the men seeking to engage in this conversation, I urge particular caution. In my blog essay “Perspective on Sexual Assault” (“www.ThoughtFromTheMountain.blogspot.com” dated 10/15/2016), I talked about how we males have minimal comprehension or comparative insight on this topic as it lives endlessly in a woman’s world. Few of us ever experience a sexual assault; few carry the lifetime wounds, isolation and powerlessness that arise from such events; few have to continually live within necessary and forced boundaries of conduct for one’s physical and mental protection. So we would do better to avoid more stupid comments about what we would have done, or what any woman should have done, in such instances. These situations are barely on our radar, or life experience, for understanding.

It should come as no surprise that a process that started from a fully political basis should now be ending as a painfully political exercise.

©   2018   Randy Bell               www.ThoughtsFromTheMountain.blogspot.com