This article is going to be about a few things, but it isn’t going to be about smearing possible sexual assault victims. It isn’t going to be about asking “Why didn’t he or she come forward earlier?” And it is definitely not going to be about rape apologetics, such as “Boys will be boys” or “They were high school kids screwing around.” This is about the art of exploiting victims to drive forward unpopular agendas.
Congressional Democrats made it explicitly clear that they wanted to block the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States as soon as President Trump announced who he had nominated to fill the seat of outgoing Justice Anthony Kennedy. Justice Kennedy had been considered a moderate, despite having been nominated by a Republican president. He had been the swing vote that determined rulings that favored the liberal social agenda on cases involving abortion and gay marriage. The arguably much more conservative Kavanaugh was immediately identified as a threat to liberal social engineering, due to his perceived conservative opinion on law and the U.S. Constitution. Rather than being open to an actual hearing, the outnumbered Democrats decided to focus on blocking whoever was nominated, by any means necessary.
The American legal system, of which the United States Supreme Court is the highest court, is built around several key precepts. One of the most important of these is that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof is that there can be absolutely no reasonable doubt that the accused is completely guilty of the crime, exactly as they are being accused. However, this latest maneuver by the Democrats sets both a disgusting and dangerous precedent: if accused, you are guilty and deserve to lose everything. The only road to clearing your name is to then to prove a negative.
Perhaps I am jaded by the tired tactics of the regressive left, but I’m not shocked to see the Democrats in Washington selecting the “argument from ignorance” as their favorite logical fallacy. The truth is, there is something quite beautiful and just to see the party of “enlightenment” and “progress” choosing ignorance as the foundation for their platform going forward into the future. However, it is only funny until people start buying into it wholesale and without investigation, choosing willful ignorance over that which is true and right.
I’m not really sure what is a more disturbing sentiment: If a few innocent guys go down for this, I don’t care as long as we get some bad ones or If you are worried about being falsely accused of rape, there is something wrong with you and/or you must be a bad person. One is a complete disregard of the truth and the other involves a complete disdain for logic and reason; both of these ideologies are cancerous. To take every accusation seriously and investigate it fully is not the same as “Believe All Survivors,” as this latest hashtag trend would presuppose that if you are accused then you are guilty, so everyone that makes the accusation an infallible survivor and victim regardless of actual evidence of crime.
If a previously undiscovered letter that was allegedly written by Bertrand Russell were to be uncovered by Dianne Feinstein, in which it was alleged that Judge Kavanaugh had secretly launched a teapot too small to be observed by telescope into orbit around the sun, nobody would accept this as truth simply because it could not be proven that a teapot wasn’t in an elliptical orbit around the center of our solar system. Just as the absence of evidence of a rape occurring is not evidence that a rape did not occur, we should not be so ready to say that a rape occurred until it can be proven that it did not.
Christine Blasey Ford, by all means, deserves to have her accusations taken seriously, which was what was being offered when Congress offered her a chance to give her testimony before voting on Judge Kavanaugh. However, her legal team’s demands and those of Democrats in Congress do nothing to add credibility to her claims. As the likelihood of her pulling out of the hearing waned, a series of accusers suddenly appeared over the weekend. Again, accusations can and should be taken seriously, but it is disgraceful that elected officials are pretending that this is a guilty conviction. If they really meant what they said, I would expect them to also proclaim their beliefs that Bill Clinton is a rapist and that Keith Ellison is a woman-beater. This isn’t “But what about…?” This is about the fact that this is a dangerous precedent to set, where an accusation is all that it takes to neutralize opponents or drive forward political agendas. That is called fascism, folks.
