A second look at two female ‘saints’
Is sainthood still subject to a challenge by an advocatis diablo, a devil’s advocate?
In the case of Anita Hill, it’s probably too late. It looks like she’s already been issued a saintly nimbus, a divine disc of light to go around her head.
And as for Christine Blasey Ford, it looks like her head is now being tape-measured for her own glowing nimbus as an indicator of saintliness.
Still, at the risk of profaning the sacred, let’s dare to take a second look at how these two now-famous ladies attained canonization status.
St. Anita came out of obscurity in 1991 as the character assassin designated at the eleventh hour to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court. Thomas was a guy who’d weathered abject poverty in the Jim Crow South to make it into and through Yale Law.
The unmentionable truth at the time was that one of the arguments for Thomas’ nomination was his skin color, namely, black. Alas, in certain circles, it was the wrong shade of black.
In some circles it was thought he took too fundamentalist a view of the Constitution’s provisions. He seemed disinclined to read between the document’s lines. He seemed overly wary of government’s tendency to exceed its constitutionally allotted authority. And he seemed too much inclined to doubt government’s capability to take on the role of all-purpose miracle worker.
Throughout the Swamp, he was deemed ideologically unsuited for the Supreme Court seat once held by the venerated Thurgood Marshall. So up popped Anita Hill with an 11th-hour story of how Thomas, when she worked for him at the U.S. Department of Education many years ago, had subjected her to smutty talk.
Smutty talk! In light of the later, fellatio-cadging, workplace lechery of Bill Clinton, the charge now seems almost prudishly Victorian. But at the time, the allegation against Thomas was sufficient to make jaws drop with a reverberating crash, especially liberal jaws.
Hill, however, was unable to offer any proof of her allegation, and Thomas went on to win a seat on the high court, in a close vote.
Today, all these years later, it remains an article of unshakable faith among those seated in the progressive pews that Justice Thomas is a proven, obscene creep — not an upstanding advocate of distaff dignity like, say, uh, Bill Clinton or the late Ted Kennedy.
Worse yet, in the view of progressives, Thomas is an intellectual inferior — and never mind the thoughtful and provocative jurisprudence he has consistently championed on the high court.
Thomas is one black man you may pillory in the most insulting, Bull Connors-like terms you can summon, without any fear of being upbraided by those public scolds who are always beating the bushes for “hate speech.”
When you scour the Internet today, you come across few articles portraying Thomas in a positive light, and endless ones portraying Anita Hill in effusively laudatory terms.
She’s widely depicted as a lady of extraordinary courage who brought out the truth about Thomas, at tremendous cost to herself, although in fact her career as a legal academic, not to mention as a guest speaker, flourished after she slimed Thomas.
There was never any evidence, not a shred, corroborating Hill’s story. Beyond that fact, there were other grounds for regarding her account with more than a little skepticism.
Why had she waited 10 years to share her explosive story? Why had she not spoken up previously, even when Thomas was nominated to the upperlevel U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, a stepping stone to the Supreme Court?
If Thomas was indeed a lewd character, why had no other women under his supervision ever lodged such accusations as Hill’s? (A dozen women who worked for Thomas gave testimony attesting to his good character.)
There was a yet more troubling issue regarding her credibility. When Thomas left that Department of Education for an appointment as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Hill voluntarily made the move with him. This despite the alleged sexual harassment she said she’d been subjected to by Thomas at the Department of Education.
She delivered her story on Capitol Hill in a mousy manner suggesting she was lowly, vulnerable secretarial help, not the professional woman, the lawyer, she actually was.
She insisted she had followed Thomas, her alleged tormentor, to the EEOC out of fear she would lose her job under a new boss at the Department of Education. But the incoming boss’s testimony was that he had asked her to stay on.
Casting further doubt on her account was the fact she held “Class A” status in the federal civil service, iron-clad job protection meaning she could have been removed from her Department of Education position only for cause.
The under-qualified Hill later secured a position as a professor at the Oklahoma U. School of Law. When questioned during the Thomas confirmation hearings, she insisted that she had had no further contact with Thomas after leaving Washington.
But phone records revealed that testimony to have been, uh, well, let’s say not strictly in accordance with truth. The phone records showed she had continued to contact Thomas, on numerous occasions. One friendly Hill phone message taken by Thomas’ secretary said: “(Anita Hill) just called to say hello. Sorry she didn’t get to see you last week.”
Was it really any surprise, when Bill Clinton later found himself in a mine field of “bimbo eruptions,” that Hill was one of those vocal “feminists” who rushed to his defense?
There are similar, glaring problem spots in the story of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s designated character assassin.
She, Christine Blasey Ford — “Doctor Ford,” as the media reverently insist she be addressed in recognition of her psychology Ph.D — likewise had no corroborating evidence to support her accusation.
She too held her silence even when Kavanaugh was nominated, as Thomas had been, to the Supreme Court stepping-stone Court of Appeals in Washington. While Hill delayed her accusations for 10 years, Ford delayed hers even longer: 36 years.
At least Hill offered vivid, though uncorroborated, details about Justice Thomas’ alleged lewd banter. Ford has no recollection of key details surrounding her supposed attempted rape at a party by Kavanaugh when the two were teenagers.
Oddly, she can recollect only the traumatic details of the alleged attempted rape itself, not other key details such as time and place. Regarding time, she has variously said the incident occurred in “the mid1980s,” “the early 80s,” when she was in her “late teens” and when she was 15.
She cannot recollect who drove her to the party at which the attack allegedly occurred. Or who drove her home. She told no one about the supposed incident at the time and for decades later.
All of the potential witnesses she cited as possibly corroborating her allegation — all — failed to do so. Including a lifelong friend. This friend’s testimony was that she has no recollection whatsoever of events such as Ford, er, Dr. Ford, alleges.
Ford has implied, but again has been vague when it comes to details, that psychotherapy had some role in the emergence of her long-delayed account. She was likewise fuzzy on the details of activist attorneys who latched onto her case. She testified that she was unaware of the arrangements for covering the fees of the lawyer team that accompanied her to Washington for the Kavanaugh hearing.
Those attorneys, it turned out, were arranged by Sen. Diane Feinstein, orchestrator of Ford’s anti-Kavanaugh revelations.
The attorneys stated they’re representing Ford free of charge, a disclosure that seemed to come as news to Ford. All of this gives off a pungent whiff of partisan political connivance.
As with Clarence Thomas, many women who had worked for Brett Kavanaugh testified to his good character.
In both cases, Hill’s and Ford’s, even the strident shrews of the militant feminist left oddly insist that the two accusers should be believed owing solely to the quavering, littledamsels-in-distress manner in which they presented their stories.
It’s not as if, in either Hill’s or Ford’s case, there was an immediate police report or real physical evidence, such as — ahem — was recently swept under the rug by the political cronies of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, in a rape accusation against a party hack in the governor’s circle of overpaid Trenton bureaucrats.
This case, still developing, involves allegations more serious than smutty talk or even aggressive teen behavior. It involves actual alleged “rape-rape,” to borrow a term from Whoopi Goldberg of “The View.”
“Rape-rape” is the term she uses to distinguish “real rape” from “mere” statutory rape — the kind, for example, that underage girls accused Sen. Robert Menendez of in unproven accusations. Luckily for him and unluckily for them, these accusers, being of meager social status and lacking doctoral or law degrees, were never favored with the designation “survivors.”
It may be too late to contest sainthood for Hill and Ford. But any factual assessment of their allegations entails — at a bare, minimum level of fairness and decency — that we all refrain from joining in their character assassinations. And all the more so given the highly politicized context of their uncorroborated accusations and their glaring inconsistencies.