This time last year, I came out publicly as the mother of a dead child and wrote a column about my lost son, Ben. I wrote about his remarkable short life and about the memorial bike ride that I take twice a year in his honor. And I’ll be taking that ride again today, knowing that it is now 20 years that he’s been gone.
But after discussing this with Ben, in the way that the living converse with the dead, I’ve come to realize that as much as I would like to write more about him, I find I’m just so angry that I feel compelled to focus on the living, breathing threats to our freedom and democracy. I know Benny would agree with me.
By now almost everyone has watched or read some if not all of the Senate Judiciary Committee Supreme Court confirmation hearing of last week. Clearly, it’s the blatant injustice that has my blood boiling. Here is a woman risking everything to come forward to calmly and publicly tell her story of sexual assault at age 15, only to be, a few hours later, responded to with a furious, tearful, dishonest rant from the accused nominee.
My anger, my frustration as I watched the spectacle of Republican senators jumping on the “angry, entitled, aggrieved white male” bandwagon to support their angry, aggrieved nominee, seems to know no bounds. I was and am astonished with the tone and tenor, the utter viciousness, the expressions of victimhood, the accusations of wrongdoing fulminating from those men in the room and directed at the Democratic senators present and anyone else who had dared to oppose the chosen one for whatever reason.
Who is the true victim here? Can it really be the nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, who spent his youth ensconced in a wealthy enclave of white privilege while so evidently boozing and carousing his way through high school and college? Or is it Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who courageously told her story of being brutally assaulted by a drunken Kavanaugh when he was 17?
By the time the hearing was over and done, it seemed that no matter how credible and believable Dr. Ford was in her testimony, with her quiet and ultra-respectful telling of her sexual assault, that testimony meant nothing. It didn’t matter one wit. And why? Because Kavanaugh’s response was an angry, misleading, spiteful, “poor me” harangue, full of blame for everyone but himself, and that’s all it took to obliterate all that went before.
One has to wonder why the actual victim in this story expressed no anger, never raised her voice, barely shed a tear as she relived the worst moments of her life and told how the assault negatively affected every moment thereafter. Well, women aren’t allowed to be angry, that’s why. We’re called shrill, irrational, out of control, even hormonal. And too emotional, imagine that. Let’s face it, women are not listened to or taken seriously whether we’re calm or angry. If Dr. Ford had expressed anger, she would have been dismissed out of hand immediately, rather than a few hours later.
But the white man defending his supposed honor is lauded for angrily yelling, while fighting back tears, literally snarling his vicious accusations against the Democratic members of the committee for allegedly smearing him. Even growling out a conspiracy theory blaming the Clintons. That Dr. Ford came forward quite independently, and did so even before he was nominated, didn’t seem to matter to this man. He was too busy imitating Trump.
Trump lies multiple times every day, he accuses without evidence, he yells, he misleads, he name calls, but I have yet to see him cry in public. Perhaps that’s reserved for the extremely important moments, like when you’re trying to save your butt, especially when you believe it belongs in a coveted seat on the Supreme Court and you see that seat slipping away.
Of course, I’m not the only one who is furious about this. Millions of women are expressing their anger, and loudly, in this year of #MeToo. They are marching and demonstrating and appearing in the offices of their elected officials to express their anger that an accused sexual predator is headed for the Supreme Court. And that no FBI investigation was going to take place to discover just how much Brett Kavanaugh lied during his sworn testimony.
The day after the hearing, some of those demonstrators were waiting outside Republican Senator Jeff Flake’s office just after he had announced his support for Kavanaugh. As he tried to dash past them, two of the women cornered him in an elevator.
One of them, Maria Gallagher, in a raised, emotion-filled voice, told him that she had been sexually assaulted and that “you’re telling all women that they don’t matter, that they should just stay quiet because if they tell you what happened to them, you are going to ignore them. That’s what happened to me, and that’s what you are telling all women in America, that they don’t matter.”
And what do you know, the senator changed his mind. Perhaps such a personal encounter with real people sharing their pain convinced him … or maybe not. But shortly after the elevator encounter, he forced the committee to impose a one-week delay in the confirmation vote to allow the FBI to investigate the allegations against Kavanaugh. Where this will lead is anyone’s guess, but it is definitely a hopeful moment.
This shows that women’s anger is as powerful and legitimate as any man’s, and that women will tolerate nothing less. It also shows that our collective anger, evidently useful in an elevator, when brought to the voting booth can and will result in systemic change. We must throw out the bums, the ones who insist on our silence, who disbelieve our stories simply because we are women.
In the face of his ugly testimony and his history, Brett Kavanaugh should not be confirmed to a seat on our highest court, nor should he have ever been nominated. But that’s where we are in our political lives right now. He has shown himself to be a sniveling, injudicious partisan, and it would be impossible to imagine him trying cases with any kind of independence and impartiality.
With that said, let’s remember that Brett Kavanaugh currently sits as a judge on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and after all we’ve learned, one has to ask, should that be allowed to continue?
Karen Gardner, of Haydenville, a retired computer programmer, is a bird watcher, nature photographer and ukulele player. She can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.