Brett Kavanaugh
I think, while taking a shower, I got to crystallize my thoughts on this matter. There’s so much piling on to Kavanaugh, and he’s being used as a referendum on all things sexual assault, but missing the point that purely based on the evidence presented he seems to not be the person who did the assaulting. He’s being pilloried as the proxy for all sexual assaults, without stopping to think if the target is on the right person. Personally, I'm firmly of the mind that this is a political hit job. The testimony of Dr. Ford has too many inconsistencies to be believed by me, and the only evidence in the Senate hearing was Dr. Ford's witnesses saying that the event in question did not occur. Compound that with the handling of the letter by Senator Feinstein it just looks like a simple tactic to delay and try to run out the clock.
Saying that, again, based on the evidence, he didn’t do what is claimed does nothing to refute or lessen the stories of men and women who have been abused and assaulted.
The bigger problem is this is yet another division being thrown into to mix of American politics — and this time people who don’t believe the accusations against Mr. Kavanaugh will be primed to not believe the next one. The boy who cried wolf syndrome.
Absolutely everyone needs a voice. But we also need due process. It’s a balancing act, but we need to not just listen to the accuser and the accused, we need to look at the evidence around the situation as well. The posters with “believe women” are damaging in my opinion; it’s based on the assumption that women can never lie or have duplicitous thoughts, which is obviously wrong. Just like men can be sexually abused, and they tend to not be believed.
I think everyone deserves the right to be heard. Both the accuser and the accused. We live in a country of laws, but we're moving closer to mob rule, and that is damaging to the country.But if you look at other similar accusations in the past, like the rapey Mayor Ed Murray in Seattle (who happened to be a proudly gay Democrat in a very left-leaning city), there were a list of accusors and all of them were shot down in the public eye. They were not believed until we got to a point where we found the Oregon records when he was a foster parent.The D or R next to someone's name should have absolutely nothing to do with how we treat these cases. There should always be a presumption of innocence, along with a clear bias towards not guilty. While it may seem unfair to the victims, it's also unfair for anyone who could be convicted on fraudulent grounds. And guilt is not transitive, you don't punish someone else for crimes committed by another.