KLAVAN: Due Process Trumps #MeToo
So much is disturbing about the Brett Kavanaugh fracas. The cynical political use of a wholly unverifiable charge to tarnish the reputation of an admired and accomplished man is disgusting. The idea that the party that rallied around “Lion of the Senate” Ted Kennedy and alleged rapist Bill Clinton now has the authority to lecture us on how to treat women is galling in its hypocrisy. And, as always, the one-sided and unfair reporting by the mainstream media is not just infuriating but also crippling to our national conversation.
But for all that, what strikes me as most dangerous about this Democrat-made fiasco is the phenomenon of leftist feminist women using their suddenly sacred feminine sensitivities to try to bully us out of our commitment to due process.
Due process means fair treatment by the legal system. Its central purpose is to protect the accused — because it is the accused who is threatened with being “deprived of life, liberty or property.”
Our Constitutional guarantees to due process only protect us from state and federal systems. But just as there is a culture of free speech that upholds our First Amendment, so there is a culture of due process that upholds our Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Whether on a college campus or in a corporation or at a non-judicial hearing, the accused should be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
This is a concept that goes to the very core of Western justice. The 18th century British jurist Sir William Blackstone said it most succinctly: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” But the logic goes all the way back to Genesis, wherein Abraham begged God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah lest even ten innocents die along with the guilty.
But oh, to hell with all that! The girls don’t like it!
Again and again, throughout this political clown show, leftist feminist women have told us that due process for the accused must step aside and make way for Girl Power. The key pillar of justice is as nothing compared with a woman’s pain, her courage in “coming forward” and the undeniable fact that sexual misbehavior is indeed a reality.
As CNN hostess Brooke Baldwin girl-splained: “What process is there when you are a woman who suffered sexual and physical assault, allegedly, who is all of a sudden realizing this past summer that the person she says assaulted her is the guy who could be the next justice on the U.S. Supreme Court … None of us can begin to understand what that process, her own process, looks like, to then have the guts to come forward.” And when her male guest attempted to agree with her, she bullied him into silence with a wagging finger and “hang on, hang on, hang on.”
Other women have “come forward” to tell their own experiences of being raped or molested as if, by some magical act of sisterhood, the fact that some woman somewhere has been mistreated by a man becomes evidence that this particular woman has been mistreated by this particular man. “Believe all women,” is the idiotic mantra of this crowd — idiotic because what you or anyone else believes is beside the point. Due process exists specifically to protect the accused from the baseless certainties of an excitable public.
And in case any of you male characters out there are still banging on about this whole innocent until proven guilty stuff, Mazie Hirono, who has actually been elected a U.S. Senator for some reason, put it clearly: “I just want to say to the men in this country: just shut up and step up, do the right thing for a change.”
Well, I just want to say to Mazie Hirono: Pound sand, lady.
The fact is, no matter what your “identity” and where it stands on the intersectional victim scale, no matter how much pain you’re in or how much courage you have in coming forward, due process for the accused trumps every claim you have.
The charge against Brett Kavanaugh is too old and too vague ever to be proved. He should not have to deal with it at all.