Inadvertent Lessons from Judge Kavanaugh’s Confirmation Hearing

Heather Stinson

As the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, continue to heat up, with now three women coming forward proclaiming that there is a side to Judge Kavanaugh that should be known by the Senate Judiciary Committee before a vote as to whether he should be promoted to the highest Court, I am struck by two unrelated concerns.

First, is this notion that a person is only capable of being one version of themselves at all times, in all places, with all types of people. Many who have known Judge Kavanaugh in various capacities over the years have made statements or submitted signatures vouching for him, since in their experience they never witnessed any behavior that would give them pause or concern. In my previous role with the Independent Reconciliation Compensation Program (“IRCP”), which is tasked with compensating victims of childhood sexual abuse by clergy covering five different Diocese in New York, I learned quickly that people are in fact capable of being more than one type of person. Certainly, those who were victims of clergy sexual abuse also learned this lesson when they witnessed their abusers lovingly administering mass on Sunday after having raped them the night before. Many of those same victims were not believed because their families and friends in the parish could not square their good interactions with the parish priest with the allegations of abuse being lodged. Thus, we must dispense with the notion that Judge Kavanaugh, or any person for that matter, is only ever always good or always bad in behavior. After all, not even the vilest pedophile priest was abusive to all children in a parish, to some he was the embodiment of God himself. How can you get much better than that?

Second, is this idea that a man, giving a woman a job, is the definition of a woman’s rights supporter, and thus the inference goes, someone who would then be incapable of otherwise harming a woman—which has been raised as Judge Kavanaugh and his supporters push back on the allegations of possible sexual assault. Judge Kavanaugh has made a point, both in an interview and other statements, to praise his own record for how many female law clerks he has previously hired and later recommended to clerkships on the Supreme Court. It genuinely concerns me that women have a harder time obtaining certain caliber clerkships, even though women make up the majority of law students. Mostly though, when Judge Kavanaugh pats himself on the back for being so willing to hire women, to me it is as if he is admitting that he could have gotten away with not hiring women, or at least not so many women. So as these previous clerks vouch for him as a person who, based on their working relationship with him (which, it should go without saying, is not the context that is at question with the allegations) is incapable of sexually assaulting a woman, they are also admitting that they owe their careers to the benevolence of a man. It should concern the entire legal profession that for women, it is still men who are making or breaking their careers. Women obviously need both male and female mentors, and as such I don’t discount Judge Kavanaugh’s intention in hiring and mentoring women. Rather, I take issue both with the idea that a logical inference from his propensity to hire females is that he would be incapable of inappropriate behavior towards a woman in any context, and with the inadvertent admission that the legal profession is still a boy’s club, either because it is the boy who gets the job, or because it is the boy who graciously bestows the job to the girl.

As for the allegations themselves, my hope is that all involved, including Judge Kavanaugh, receive proper support and a fair hearing. Let us focus on what matters and dispense with distracting and erroneous ideas, such as the idea that a person is only ever all good or all bad. The purposes of the allegations being brought forward are to attest to the character and ability of a judicial nominee, period. If true, these allegations point to a side of Judge Kavanaugh that may disqualify him for this particular job. There are so few people who will ever sit in one of those nine seats it behooves us to make sure we ascertain all we need to know about a nominee before handing over that chair.