All I’m going to say here is that things – in this thread, as in America – have reached a point of raging partisanship, misogyny, and hateful divisiveness that I never would have thought possible. Truly, it is the era of Trump.
Jesus.
You guys defending Kavanaugh by saying it’s not such a big deal?
Do you realize that he’s denying all of it? That even Trump is denying it?
Kavanaugh says he didn’t do it. You’re saying that it wasn’t a big deal, attempted rape is a thing that happens, no big deal, you try to rape a girl and the next day you move on with your life.
Again, Jesus.
Note what he said and what he didn’t say. He said (I remind you again):
Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that I don’t think what she alleges to have happened to her is all that serious.
Note the tense: Present. Present tense means that’s what he thinks now, not what (some shitty) people might have thought 35 years ago.
Or, be overpowered and raped. Fun times, fun times.
Oh, fuck that noise. It was sexual assault then, too. And “trying to get laid,” at least in my crowd, meant trying to get a girl interested in having sex with you, not trying to have sex with her whether she wanted it or not.
If you have some “responsibility” for something, you have share part of the blame. The word used was “responsibility”. She certainly didn’t feel “responsible” for how society was, if it was even like that in 1982. I think a girl could reasonably go to a pool party in 1982 wearing a bathing suit and not expect to be sexually assaulted.
Anyway, that whole train of thought by SA is too bizarre to continue.
No. You’re trying to weasel.
You said:
That’s not a statement about the veracity of her claim; that’s about the severity of the claimed behavior. When confronted with what a horrifying shitstorm of a statement that is, you want to pretend like you were talking about the veracity of the claim.
Bullshit, Ultra. Bullshit.
This is not an accurate description of young adults’ life in the early 1980s, when the incident that Ford described occurred. Unlike Starving Artist, who was over 30 at that time, I was a high school and college student during that period, and I can attest that there was a great deal of discussion at all levels, from college administrations to student dorms, about consent and sexual coercion. It was indeed widely considered “morally wrong” and a “moral outrage” for boys to physically hold girls down and try to force themselves on them.
No need to take my word for it, either: look at, say, Google Ngram viewer documentation of the occurrence of the phrase “date rape”, which starts appearing in print around the mid-1970s and spikes in the early to mid-1980s. Many young people at the time were definitely regarding such behavior in light of its “moral wrongness”, not merely dismissing it as “just the way life was”. (Although I concede that the young people who were actually committing such behavior were generally keen to have it lightly passed over as “just the way life was” rather than as “morally wrong”.)
Look, buddy, I was 28 years old in 1982. I was seeing different women, getting lucky with some, and not so lucky with others - par for the course. But I remember the mores of the time quite well, thankyewverymuch. Your bullshit is bullshit.
Why are you acting as though she hasn’t mentally revisited this incident constantly since it happened? After 36 years, not only are we talking about having a memory of the incident but we’re also talking about memories on top of memories from repeatedly reliving what happened. This is how traumatic experiences impact people.
When I was a kid (maybe 8 or 9, can’t be sure) I remember riding in the car with my parents and twin sister. My parents were bickering about something (can’t remember what) when all of a sudden my dad exploded. Next thing I know he got out of the car in a huff and walked off somewhere; my mom had to drive us home. The three of us rode back speechless.
My memory of that scene is very incomplete but I will never forgot how emotionally jarred it made me. I was convinced my dad was never coming back to us and it filled me with panic. I was anxious because I didn’t know how he was going to get home. I was angry my parents fought like that to begin with. I felt bad for my mother. I wanted to be reassured that everything was going to be all right, but I didn’t know how to get that reassurance or from where. It is without a doubt that this experience throttled me because I’ve recalled this memory many times since then and I still feel the weight from those remembered emotions. I can still taste the fear and sadness triggered by my dad unexpectedly leaving us in the car, in the middle of the street.
So all your “perhaps” are underwhelming.
I bet the GOP bass is ready to get cranked up to 11.
(When they need that extra push over the cliff.)
All their bass will belong to us!
So, it is a fishing expedition after all.
Suppose everything she said was true. In that case… I still don’t believe her and you don’t have any reason to either.
Kavanaugh: I did not have sexual intercourse in high school or for “many years thereafter.”
Kavanaugh: “Breasts feel like bags of… sand, right fellas?”
A guy broke into my house one night many years ago. I’ve spoken about it here before. He wandered through the house for twenty minutes or so, including three trips into my bedroom, each time bending over my bed and at one point with his face only a foot from mine. As you might imagine, I wondered if I might be killed.
I was also threatened with death by the hulking, angry and bullying ex-boyfriend of a young woman I was dating who showed up at the apartment complex I lived at and threatened to beat the shit out of everyone by the pool if they didn’t tell him which apartment was mine. That situation was resolved when he was killed in an auto accident.
And I was held at knifepoint at this same complex by a couple of angry whatever-the-word-is-for-Indians-these-days during the time of the protests at Wounded Knee.
Any guesses as to how much these events traumatized me? Or how much they affected my life from that point on?
People can be tough and cope with adversity if they’re taught to be that way, and then they get on with their lives. They can also be timid little flowers forever self-identifying as VICTIMS in the aftermath of adversity if they’re taught to be that way, and they can let it affect them negatively from that point on.
But all of this is beside the point really. Apart from that ridiculous article in the Washington Post there is nothing in Christine Ford’s history to indicate that she was traumatized at all by what she says occurred that night. She finished high school two to three years later, then went to school in North Carolina for four years, and then moved to California for her Masters and Ph.D. She took up athletic pursuits, got married, and lived what appears to have been an unremarkable life. She has obviously felt something is wrong within her as she felt the need to take up therapy in the wake of certain academic struggles, but only mentioned Kavanaugh upon his having been mentioned as a possible SCOTUS candidate for Romney and later for Trump. She’s also said that it was her therapy sessions which brought out her memory of what Kavanaugh allegedly did that night.
So I’m sorry, but I still maintain that what allegedly happened that night was not all that serious, and that her relatively recently revealed trauma is motivated far more by politics than by the events that took place that night in 1982.
The fish are on their way to destruction.
Back in the day, we were amazed at how many teenagers stuck flowers in their hair and ran to San Francisco. Also amazing was how many of them were girls, disproportionately, seemed to us, in our relative innocence. Turns out, they weren’t running to the hippies, they were running from Daddy.
Ah. The ole “times were different” then argument.
Let’s accept that the mores and values of the jewel-toned 1980s were different from today. But while we do that, let us pretend that we are deliberating another SCJ nominee, not Kavanaugh. And instead of “mere” sexual assault, we are talking about actual rape–an accusation levied by his ex-wife. And the rape accusation is substantianted by multiple independent witnesses(siblings and friends).
When this act is alleged to have occurred, the concept of marital rape wasn’t even considered a “thing” by lots of people, especially Christian conservatives. It wasn’t something that your typical mainline pastor would encourage, of course. But a violent crime? You would be laughed out of the room for even suggesting that in some circles. At the very least, most people would just find it icky. Not necessarily criminal.
Would it be wrong to not want a SCJ with this particular skeleton in his closet? I don’t think so. Not when the SCJ might be the deciding vote on a slew of cases affecting women’s sexual and reproductive freedom. It isn’t even a matter of the justice’s ability to be objective. It is a matter of making sure that reasonable people can have trust in that individual. Rape victims should not have to worry about whether the judge they are standing in front of is biased against them. A judge that is perceived to have more empathy for rapists than rape victims is not a good judge, even if he is a Constitutional scholar who went to Yale.
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