Christine Blasey Ford

David Brooks: “A Complete National Disgrace”

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Senate Holds Confirmation Hearing For Brett Kavanugh To Be Supreme Court Justice

There is little I disagree with in David Brooks’s analysis of Kavanaugh hearings.  Here is a taste:

These hearings were also a devastating blow to intellectual humility. At the heart of this case is a mystery: What happened at that party 36 years ago? There is no corroborating evidence either way. So the crucial questions are: How do we sit with this uncertainty? How do we weigh the two contradictory testimonies? How do we measure these testimonies when all of cognitive science tells us that human beings are really bad at spotting falsehood? Should a person’s adult life be defined by something he did in high school?

Commentators and others may have acknowledged uncertainty on these questions for about 2.5 seconds, but then they took sides. If they couldn’t take sides based on the original evidence, they found new reasons to confirm their previous positions. Kavanaugh is too angry and dishonest. He drank beer and threw ice while in college. With tribal warfare all around, uncertainty is the one state you are not permitted to be in.

Read the rest here.

Brooks’s point about intellectual humility is an interesting one, especially for historians.  How do we treat out sources?  How do we use those sources to find out “what happened?”  What can and can’t we know?  Any historian knows that this is a difficult task and one in which knee-jerk reactions and political rhetoric are not always helpful in getting at the truth.

White Evangelicals and the New Marist Poll

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Blasey

Here are some of the findings:

  • 72% of white evangelicals approve of the job Donald Trump is doing as president (and 44% “strongly approve).
  • 71% of white evangelicals say that they will vote for a Republican in the 2018 midterms.
  • 58% of white evangelicals say that they are likely to vote for a congressional candidate in November 2018 who supports the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. (27% of white evangelicals say that the confirmation of Kavanaugh will not make any difference in how they vote in November 2018).
  • 56% of white evangelicals have a “favorable impression” of Brett Kavanaugh. (31% are either “unsure” or have “never heard” of Kavanaugh).
  • Only 9% of white evangelicals have a “favorable impression” of Christine Blasey Ford.  59% of white evangelicals are “unsure” of her or have “never heard” of her.
  • 51% of white evangelicals have been following the Kavanaugh news coverage “very closely” or “closely.”
  • If Kavanaugh did commit the acts that Christine Blasey Ford said that he did, 48% of white evangelicals would still support his confirmation to the Supreme Court.
  • Only 14% of white evangelicals think Christine Blasey Ford told the truth about what happened at the party in high school.  41% are “not sure” who to believe.
  • 64% of white evangelicals support the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

Liberty University Students Came to the U.S. Senate on Thursday to Support Kavanaugh

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Liberty U Kavanaugh

Liberty University staged a rally for Kavanaugh (Huffington Post photo)

And their president, court evangelical Jerry Falwell Jr., was with them.

The Lynchburg News & Advance reports:

About 300 Liberty University students traveled to Washington, D.C. Thursday to support Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who is under fire with two accusers alleging sexual assault and another claiming to have witnessed such behavior.

While the marathon Senate Judiciary Committee hearing unfolded on Capitol Hill, Liberty students attending a Concerned Women for America and Women for Kavanaugh rally. They also visited the office of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to show their support for the Judiciary Committee chairman.

“We wanted [Kavanaugh’s] voice to be heard … and to support him and his family,” said Victoria Belk, an LU student and president of LU’s Young Women for America, a college chapter of CWA. “True equality is hearing from both sides; hearing him out was important to us.”

Read the rest here.  The Huffington Post has posted a video of the rally here.

Over at Religion News Service, Jason Lupfer argues that conservative evangelical support for Kavanaugh will cost them.  Here is a taste of his piece:

Politically,  white conservative Christians have been invaluable to the country club wing of the Republican Party, which put their zeal to work to end an era of social progress on civil rights, economic equality and fiscal health. The old guard used its newfound clout to enact deficit-financed tax cuts, decimate the labor movement and shift an ever higher percentage of the national income to those at the very top.

Meanwhile, their own principles suffered.

Few white evangelicals or conservative Catholics were put off by the party’s embrace of leaders who demonized Islam, disparaged undocumented immigrants and rolled back voting rights. They helped ensure that the Republicans ended up abandoning morality altogether and nominating for president a vulgar, spiteful man who boasted of his own sexual assaults.

Now it seems that president has nominated a judge who shares the political values of conservative evangelicals but may have violated many of their morals. Drunken parties and sexual assault are the kinds of things that Liberty University — and Concerned Women for America — have abhorred in the past.

But they no longer seem to give these conservative evangelicals pause.

So often when religion and politics mix, religion is sullied. As the evangelicals have risen in prominence, we have heard less and less about the Old, Old Story, and wondered if they even believed it at all.

The country has suffered under this partnership as well.

Read the entire piece here.  Much of what Lupfer writes here meshes well with my own work in Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.

Believe Me 3d

If Kavanaugh Did It, Will Evangelicals Turn Their Backs On Him?

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U.S. Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh meets with Senate Majority Leader McConnell and VP Pence on Capitol Hill in Washington

Of course not.

If it turns out that Kavanaugh did sexually assault Christian Blasey Ford (or someone else), he will still have the support of many conservative evangelicals.

As Franklin Graham recently implied, the conservative evangelicals of the Christian Right will overlook Kavanaugh’s indiscretions as long as they continue to believe he will be the deciding vote in overturning Roe v. Wade or as long as he remains an originalist.  They will argue that this incident happened a long time ago and is no longer “relevant.”

Quote of the Day

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Dante

Liberty University English professor and author Karen Swallow Prior on the Kavanaugh nomination and the Blasey Ford accusations:

“I don’t expect we will ever know the truth about what did or did not happen. But as an evangelical Christian, I am convinced Dante himself could not have devised a more fitting circle of hell for my faith community than the one in which we find ourselves: being destroyed from the inside out by the sexual sin we spent decades pointing out everywhere but in our own house. For us, this is the real trial.”

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