As soon as Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation against Judge Brett Kavanaugh came out, the world may as well have split into two camps, as ideological as they are sexist.
#BelieveHer or #BelieveSurvivors caught on like wildfire on social media. Women’s magazines and female Hollywood stars circled their Instagram accounts and hashtags, determined to rally around women just because they are women, and to comfort and encourage Ford in her dark time.
Right-of-center thinkers countered, gravitating naturally toward the Supreme Court seat that matters to them as much as Gorsuch’s did, hoping the reason many sacrificed their conscience and voted for Trump anyway would bear the fruit of not one but two or more seats. For them, #IStandwithKavanaugh is their rallying cry; due process must mean something if not to a man poised to sit on the Supreme Court.
But neither of these hashtags, movements, or ideas seems to retain any real authority in this situation. We are not a banana republic made up of kangaroo courts but a land of laws, due process, and justice. This is hard to grasp for many because Kavanaugh isn’t just a man. He has in just a few days, morphed into a monstrous symbol of the patriarchy, a white privileged elite who may (or may have not) behaved in an unruly, even criminal fashion, toward women – assaulting and carousing with them while drinking and partying his way through prep school and the Ivy League, only to eventually find his way to the top of the legal ladder, vying for a seat on the Supreme Court, facing no consequences for his seemingly reckless younger years.
To most conservatives, this moment in time feels like a grievous error, either completely fabricated or blown out of proportion. To many, Kavanaugh’s experience will prove to be that of the Duke lacrosse players and those involved in the University of Virginia rape case – both cases where women falsely accused men of rape – and which seems identical, or at least, apropos. Of course women are assaulted and raped at a rate that surpasses men, but in this case, if Kavanaugh is innocent, isn’t that slander far worse?
But since most of the people speaking passionately about this topic, from Twitter users to Hollywood stars, aren’t lawyers and wouldn’t know a deposition from a cert petition, it might be easier to remember how this nation’s legal system is supposed to work when one thinks of this situation through the lens of a real person: What if this were my son being accused, or my daughter doing the accusing? For some reason, likely because Ford is a woman and Kavanaugh seems to be the privileged sacrificial lamb, the latter seems most obvious. Women want to believe women and they want other men to believe women. But what about men?
For those willing to vilify Kavanaugh with little to no evidence, corroboration, or facts, what if the same were hurled against your college son following a spring break trip to the beach? This happens, and it happens often. It happens so much that a group of these mothers–mothers whose sons were falsely accused of rape–banded together, support each other, and even petitioned Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos about the topic. The New York Times featured them. “But a growing corps of legal experts and defense lawyers have argued that the Obama rules created a culture in which accused students, most of them men, were presumed guilty. And some of the most potent advocates for those men have been a group of women: their own mothers.”
As a mother of two sons and two daughters, I am far more concerned about the world my sons are going to inhabit than my daughters. Sure, I’m doing my best to raise all of them to be strong, independent, critical-thinking people, as well as kind and caring. I no more want my daughters to be assaulted by a man than I do my sons to be falsely accused of assaulting a woman. Yet this is how the world is turning out to be – and this Kavanaugh confirmation reached that inevitable conclusion: Immediately the weaker sex was to be believed and the one in power was obviously abusing it because people feel bad that women have been abused for so long (and many have). Social media has worsened this because of the lightning-quick way it infiltrates and misinforms. Still, there is too much at stake here for reactions and feelings, for hashtags and bandwagons – on either side of the coin.
What does the Kavanaugh hearing teach my sons about men and society? It shows him whether he lives well or makes mistakes, his name may be maligned, his character attacked to a degree from which he can hardly recover. What does the Kavanaugh hearing teach my daughters about women and society? It shows them they are weak and naive and can get away with saying anything, anytime, anywhere – not in spite of their sex but because of it. Last time I checked, society had decided to teach women sex doesn’t matter, only merit and effort do.
Men must be taught to be strong, good, assertive, and kind but they will cease to offer a hand, teach a basketball game, make a phone call, or help with a science test, if they think they are going to be accused, slandered, harassed, and labeled, or even thrown in jail, without an adequate assumption of innocence or due process.
This is not the world we want for our sons – and frankly it’s not the world we want for our daughters. They deserve that too. After all, it’s often that very process that brings an abusive man or rapist to his knees in a courtroom and puts him behind bars. We have now thrown fairness, justice, and caution aside in favor of a social media frenzy of “he said, she said,” wrapped in decades of dust, inside an enigma of sexism, stereotypes, and blame.
If you would not want your son or daughter falsely accused of assault, rape, or worse, just as you wouldn’t want your son or daughter to be assaulted, raped or worse, there’s a reason for that. Justice, law, liberty, and equity are etched innately in the human heart and soul by the Creator for a purpose because we are made with purpose. False accusations as well as heinous crimes – whatever side this coin lands on – cause pain because they violate that purpose and strip the soul bare of its nature.
If we would not want to see the look of anguish on our son’s faces as he informs us he is falsely accused of rape, why would we do so with any other man?
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
