Irony: Nobel Peace Prize for Anti-Rape Activist, as US Senate Puts Alleged
Abuser on Highest Court
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
06 October 18
If the allegations of Professor Christine Blasey Ford against Brett
Kavanaugh are true, then he was a juvenile criminal. He and a friend plotted
out how to get girls inebriated, force them into an upstairs side room, turn
up the music to drown out screams, jump on top of them, and have their way
with them. If they did this once, they almost certainly did it more than
once. There is not any difference between this criminal repertoire and what
Cosby did except that he knocked his victims all the way out. And maybe
sometimes the preppie criminals in Kavanaugh's circle did, as well. Rohypnol
or roofies are sometimes resorted to in the hyper-masculine frat boy party
scene (not all fraternities are badly behaved, but a few have been very
badly behaved). We don't have the sort of proof against Kavanaugh that would
convict him in a court of law, since the crime was committed so long ago.
But personally I believe Professor Blasey Ford and since Kavanaugh in his
testimony revealed himself to be a royal a-hole, I definitely don't believe
him. (And no, you can't believe both of them and no she can't have been
confused about the identity of her would-be rapist. Either you believe her
or you don't; have the courage to say so and stop prevaricating. I'm looking
at you, Susan Collins.)
Moreover, the question of heavy drinking or partying hard has been raised
only with regard to confirming Blasey Ford's account. I'd hate for us to be
so puritanical that we punish people for having too good a time when they
were young. The issue is coercion, making someone do something they don't
want to do.
There is another phenomenon that young men wilding and sexually assaulting
young women brings to mind, and that is ISIL (or ISIS or Daesh). To the
cries that it is grossly unfair to compare Kavanaugh to ISIL terrorists, I
will say that I'm not making a global comparison. The Republican Party is
not like ISIL and Kavanaugh is not generally speaking a terrorist. I am only
comparing the sense of male entitlement in a handful of young men in the GOP
to that among the ISIL fighters, and only with regard to those who believe
it is all right to coerce young women. (Nor is this a problem of only one
party).
Still, it is ironic that Kavanaugh should be voted onto the Court on the
same weekend when the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Nadia Murad, a
woman who belongs to the Yazidi religious minority among Kurds in Iraq and
Syria. Yazidis are not Muslims but half a million or so have managed to
survive in rugged places like the area around Sinjar.
ISIL attacked and killed a lot of Muslims, too, but it especially killed
Yazidi men and enslaved their wives and daughters.
ISIL killed Nadia Murad's mother and then enslaved and repeatedly raped her
over a three month period, until she escaped from Mosul, then an ISIL
stronghold.
Compelling a young woman to have sex is rape. What Kavanaugh is alleged to
have attempted to do is criminal. What a young ISIL guerrilla did to Nadia
Murad differs in quantity and severity, not in kind, from what Kavanaugh is
accused of trying to do.
The United States has won many Nobel Prizes. But this year an Iraqi woman
was honored, for her activism in saving coerced women and advertising their
plight.
It is all the more shameful that the Republican Senate chose this moment to
be the anti-Nadia Murad, and to put a tainted candidate on the Supreme
Court.
One third of laws are now issued as executive orders by the president, with
only 2/3s being passed by a legislature. If the executive orders are
challenged in court, they go to the Supreme Court. If ambiguous legislation
is challenged in court, it goes to the Supreme Court.
Corporations need the court to rule in favor of Capital every time, and
Kavanaugh will. He is very young and very conservative. He will serve them
for decades.
Democrats put in old centrist on the Supreme Court. Republicans put in young
jurists who are on the far right
They're not afraid of being unpopular or losing midterms. They're afraid of
not getting their way in the courts on issues affecting the millionaires,
billionaires and the Americans who work for them. Republicans lost most of
Congress in 2008, but in 2010 they came right back. Elections are ephemeral.
The rich and partisans of the rich are too few by themselves to hope to
prevail in a popular election, so the GOP allied with Evangelicals, for whom
Kavanaugh serves to hold out hope that Roe v. Wae will be overturned. Some
political Christianity, like some Political Islam, tends to stand for the
proposition that God has given control of women's bodies into the hands of
men.
To reward both their financial backers and the mass of their voters in one
fell swoop, and to accomplish something that will last possibly for 30
years, is far to central to the GOP to let a little thing like a youthful
attempted rape get in the way. This step is a form of extreme political
corruption of the sort the Founding Generation dreaded when they denounced
political parties and party spirit.
As with ISIL, ultimately patriarchy is simply one form of the will to power.
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