The Kavanaugh Nomination: What to do with accusations of past bad acts.

Eugene Vidocq, who lived an exemplary life after an early one as a thief and whom Jean Valjean was based upon.

Kavanaugh will not wreck the Constitution, as we just noted, but that doesn't mean he should be a Supreme Court justice.

Particularly if there's something heinous in his past that disqualifies him.

But is there?

Well, we don't really know, but he has been accused of something and that is something is pretty bad.

Christine Blasey Ford, now a research psychologist, has alleged that when she was in her teenage years she was at a party in which Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge Young locked in her a room and, while they were heavily drunk, groped her and maybe tried to do worse.

Now, Kavanaugh, who has undeniably lead an honorable adult life, absolutely denies it as does Mark Judge Young.  Ford absolutely maintains its true.  There's nothing strongly about Ford that would in any way cause us to doubt her (except perhaps her profession, I hate to say that but psychology is not a reliable field and frankly psychologist aren't always either). And all of the things that people tend to point out as problematic are frankly associated with any crime that's revealed years and years later, including the lack of recollection of details.

So we're down, really, to two people saying it didn't happen and one saying it did.  That leaves us with the situation of either Kavanaugh lying or Ford lying.  Somebody is (it may not be Young, he is a self confessed alcoholic who was in his teenage years and he might genuinely not recall if anything happened).

Added to this are some really uncomfortable truths.

One is that these nominations have become so problematic that it's now the case that people will make stuff up to stop one.  Am I saying that Ford did. No, I'm not.  Diane Feinstein did hold this information from July until September, which is problematic, but that's not Ford's fault.

Still, its a reality we have to consider.

Over the past couple of years we've seen the Me Too Movement really break out. By and large that's been a good thing, although I've repeatedly thought that the movement has been tainted by a strained attempt to create out of whole cloth a "new standard" which in fact is the old Christian standard that became so passe post 1970.  At any rate, the resurrection of that old standard, which is the reality of it, has been a good thing.

But it has also mean that the door has really been thrown wide open to false accusations, and they do happen.

Indeed, at this point, nearly every man in any position of authority is open to the accusation as its easy to make and hard to disprove.  Merely making the accusation does the damage, and sometimes people seek to do that damage for their own aims, which are sometimes political.  If this hasn't happened to date, it will at some point.

Additionally, we have the really uncomfortable question of what point can there be, and when can there be in general, a societal statute of limitations on some acts, no matter how horrible they are.

On this, I don't mean a criminal statute of limitations.  Contrary to what a lot of press reports have been saying, it is not necessarily the case that these acts are past the statute of limitations.  Not all states have statutes of limitations on criminal acts. Wyoming, for example, does not.  So perhaps, if this occurred, its prosecutable.  I have no idea.

No, I'm asking a wider question of at what point does society have to forgive, or should it forgive?

What about Jean Valjean?

People are aware, of course, of the protagonist of Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables, but rarely do they consider the figure in context.  Valjean is a thief who reforms and goes on to be virtuous.

Indeed, such examples are not rare, and Valjean himself was based on a real figure, Eugene Vidocq, who had done just that.  Many others could be found, including some who went on not only to lead saintly lives, but to be actual Saints.  Indeed the first man that Christs affirmatively relates will join him in Heaven was such a person, the penitent thief who was also being crucified.

Russian Orthodox Icon, the Good Thief In Paradise.

None of which means that such individuals need to be forgiven by society, or that they need to be forgiven when they have lived an exemplary life and seek to obtain high office.  

Or maybe it actually does.  Vidocq, noted above, did just that, becoming an important figure in his own time and in his own society.  Plenty of other examples could be found.

Of course, Kavanaugh is accused of attempted rape, which is different.  Or maybe he isn't. And that's part of the problem.

The claimed events are related to have occurred at a prep school party at some undetermined point in the 1980s about which many details have forgotten.  Ford represents she was wearing clothes and a swimsuit underneath it and she claims that Kavanaugh, with Young aiding, basically, groped her and attempted worse.  But did they?

What they may have done is engaged in some really horrific groping activity that frankly wouldn't have been all that unusual in that setting at that time, which is disgusting in and of itself.  But should that bar a person in more mature years?  Well, even that's hard to know as we don't know if that was their intent alone, or if they were after more.  We never will, just as we don't even know if it really occurred.  Indeed, given as alcohol seems to have been an element of all of this, we don't know that something didn't occur, but that others may have been involved instead.  There are enough details that we can believe any story we care to out of this, which means that nobody except perhaps those directly involved know the truth.

Leaping back for a second, if it did occur, then the honorable thing to do at this point would be for Kavanaugh to explain it and publicly repent.  That he's not doing that would suggest that, give the balance of his life, it didn't happen.  Or maybe it did and he lying.  On the latter, in the current atmosphere, it's unlikely that he'd be forgiven publicly, after all.  Still, living with the lie would be horrific.

Although somebody is doing just that with the Clarence Thomas matter, which had the same elements, but in a less violent form.

Indeed, another uncomfortable aspect of all of this is that we tend to look at the sensationalized past and ignore the reformed present.

I don't want to go into it deeply, as it would appear to send the wrong message, but one of the things that came out of the recent grand jury release in Pennsylvania about sexual accusations against Catholic clerics is that past 2002 there had been two.  In other words, the evidence on the events strongly indicates that the Church got its act together and these incidents have largely ceased. That's a success story, but it's been wholly ignored.  It probably shouldn't be, no matter what other lessons can be learned.

If that can be true about an institution, it can be about an individual as well, and that's the pleasing and uncomfortable truth about a huge section of society. Like it or not, there are a lot of people with hideous early conduct of all types, and I mean all, that go on to exemplary lives later on.  If you know them personally, and I know some people like that, you wouldn't have wanted their early lives to rise up to crush them in later life.  Conversely, and not as focused on now, but at one time in the past very much focused on, some with exemplary lives go on to collapse with success.  Indeed, both are very common.  

So, no answers.  The drama will go on, and Kavanaugh will likely be confirmed, but somebody has lied and Kavanaugh will have to bear the public ruin of his reputation forever, probably.

Which brings me to one final thing.

As odd as this may seem, and it really says nothing about any of the parties in this directly, its time that we stop nominating people for high office with prep school and Ivy League educations.  I know I've said that repeatedly, but the entire country has really good education and we've managed to go from a more open court, in terms of those eligible, to a less open one.  The whole atmosphere of the alleged party incident reads like something out of some stupid prep school drama, and we can forego and should forgo that class for awhile.  Not perhaps as to Kavanaugh, but to whomever is next.  Why can't a nominee be out of a public school in New Jersey or Kansas, etc., for a change?