Conservatives are so named because they aim to conserve bastions of liberty – including free speech, due process, and unfettered religious practice – from the diverse threats that jeopardize them, no matter where they come from.
On Oct. 4, Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania professor, took aim at due process in a Time magazine piece with the headline: “The Response to the Kavanaugh Allegations Exposes the Lessons We Failed to Learn from the Catholic Clergy's Abuse.” Hamilton’s credentials and her history of helping victims of child sex abuse are impressive, but her argument left much to be desired.
Hamilton urged that the theme connecting the Catholic priest scandal to Kavanaugh’s ordeal is the worry over “falsely maligning ‘good men.’” She praised the prosecutors and victims of the Church scandal for casting that qualm aside and ushering in a “new cultural willingness to listen” to victims. The presence of that same worry among Kavanaugh supporters, according to her, demonstrated their utter lack of compassion.
But that was never the concern for conservatives – it’s a straw man that Hamilton constructed. The true concern was a lack of corroborating evidence for Ford’s story, and Hamilton even admitted that the crimes of priests were “harrowing and supported with ample evidence,” although she never acknowledged that the exact opposite is true with the accusations against Kavanaugh.
Despite that slip-up, Hamilton followed her logic to its bitter end: “Simply, the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard cannot be safely applied when the object is to learn who the hidden predators are or when one seeks to right the balance of power between victims and aggressors.”
This is jaw-dropping. Hamilton has sanctioned an all-out witch hunt, where powerful or otherwise “privileged” men are stripped of the presumption of innocence so potential predators can be stabbed at in the dark. If some innocent men get convicted, big deal – the pendulum will have swung in favor of the oppressed.
Hamilton’s comparison obscures the truth, and invites a world where rights vanish.
