The
Salem witch trials turned on what was called “spectral evidence.” That was
testimony from witnesses—either malicious or hysterical—who claimed the accused
had assumed the form of a black cat or some other devilish creature and had
come visiting in the night in order to torment the witness with bites and
scratches, or to rearrange the bedroom furniture, or to send the baby into
paroxysms.
The judge, William Stoughton, admitted this nonsense into
evidence. Hysterical fantasies had real consequences: Sarah Good and four other
defendants were hanged on July 19, 1692.
Three hundred twenty-six years later, an anonymous woman—a
spectral and possibly nonexistent woman, for all that one knew when the story
emerged—accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her 36 years ago, when
he was a high-school student. It seemed as if the American constitutional
process might be drawn back to the neighborhood of Salem, Mass. According to
this phantom testimony, 17-year-old Brett held the girl down, pawed her and
tried to force himself upon her, and held his hand over her mouth when she
screamed, until a second prep-school devil piled on top, they all tumbled to
the floor, and the girl managed to slip away. The boys were “stumbling drunk,”
according to the account.
You were supposed to feel the sudden wind-shear of
hypocrisy. The nominee was a seeming paragon—perfect father and husband and
coach of his daughters’ basketball teams. He is a Roman Catholic with an Irish
name, but now the script became as gleefully Calvinist as a Hawthorne tale.
What imp of hell had possessed the Kavanaugh boy? The Protestant tale seemed to
obtain subliminal verification against the background of Catholic sex-abuse
scandals.
Thus the constitutional process takes on an aspect of the
21st-century medieval. The accuser’s story first emerged in a letter that came
into the hands of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Ms. Feinstein brought it to
light only after the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing, which featured
somewhat Salem-like drama—costumed apparitions from “The Handmaid’s Tale”
arranging themselves outside the committee room; inarticulate background
screams of people being led away for disrupting the proceedings. It seemed as
if Ms. Feinstein, not liking the odds of defeating Judge Kavanaugh’s
confirmation, had found a devilishly clever way to head it off after all.
But then the accuser materialized, in the form of a
51-year-old California professor of clinical psychology, Christine Blasey Ford.
What to make of it now? The tale became a lot less spectral.
Still, there had been no police report, and there were no witnesses. The second
boy allegedly in the room said he had no memory of such an incident and called
the accusation “absolutely nuts.” Judge Kavanaugh flatly denied it. Her
therapist’s notes from 30 years later are not objective reporting, merely a transcription
of what Ms. Ford herself said.
The thing happened—if it happened—an awfully long time ago,
back in Ronald Reagan’s time, when the actors in the drama were minors and (the
boys, anyway) under the blurring influence of alcohol and adolescent hormones.
No clothes were removed, and no sexual penetration occurred. The sin, if there
was one, was not one of those that Catholic theology calls peccata
clamantia—sins that cry to heaven for vengeance.
The offense alleged is not nothing, by any means. It is
ugly, and stupid more than evil, one might think, but trauma is subjective and
hard to parse legally. Common sense is a little hard put to know what to make
of the episode, if it happened. The dust of 36 years has settled over the
memory. The passage of time sometimes causes people to forget; sometimes it
causes them to invent or embellish. Invention takes on bright energies when its
muse is politics, which is the Olympics of illusion. Inevitably, people will
sort the matter out along mostly partisan lines. A lot will depend upon the
testimony of Ms. Ford, who has volunteered to appear before the Senate
Judiciary Committee. If the left expects a windfall from all this in November,
it may find itself instead the victim of a terrific backlash.
These are part of the 21st century’s strange sectarian
struggles. In another Senate hearing a year ago, Ms. Feinstein addressed Amy
Coney Barrett, a Notre Dame law professor, about her nomination to the Seventh
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Ms. Feinstein began fretting earnestly about the
nominee’s Catholicism. “The dogma lives loud within you,” the senator told the
professor—an oddly mystical locution.
But 21st-century progressivism is also a religion—a militant
faith, a true church in nearly all important respects. It is a community of
belief and shared values, with dogmas, heresies, sacraments and fanatics; with
saints it reveres and devils it abhors, starting with the great Satan Donald
Trump. If religion were to disqualify a Catholic from public service, it would
logically have to disqualify a practicing progressive, who is the creature of a
belief system that is, on the whole, considerably more dogmatic than the one
with headquarters in Rome.
Mr. Morrow, a senior
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a former essayist for Time.
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