Not just one man’s reputation on line

There’s more at stake in Washington this week than the philosophical composition of the US Supreme Court. Judge Brett Kavanaugh is fighting for his name and reputation against the inquisition engineered by the Democrats on the judiciary committee of the US Senate, and what is struggling to survive is nothing less than hundreds of years of law, precedent and guarantees of justice inherited from Anglo-saxon legal tradition.

If destroying a reputation without evidence wins the day, the cornerstone of the American judicial system — the presumption of ‘‘innocent until proved guilty’’ — will crumble. The circumstances of the Democrats’ game have all the earmarks of the down-and-dirty.

From the casting couch to the Oval Office, men have used powerful positions to prey on vulnerable women, and men who do that should be called to account. But doing the wrong thing includes bearing false witness, and women no less than men are capable of bearing false witness, which is why, under our system of justice, men and women are presumed to be innocent until proved guilty.

Both men and women, including senators from New York to California and beyond to islands in the Pacific, are obliged to put aside their own political and sexual biases to determine who is telling the truth. Justice must be blind, but not deaf.