Our view: Despite Senate vote, #MeToo movement will endure
There is something wholly, if tragically, American about what the nation just endured in choosing a new Supreme Court justice.
The bruising battle was a cultural moment in some ways more important than the nominee himself. With Brett Kavanaugh confirmed by the Senate and swiftly sworn in to serve on the nation’s highest court, the world will continue spinning on its axis.
What remains is the unfinished, age-old American business of forming a more perfect union, those indelible words in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution that “we the people” can never escape. Nor ever would want to.
The year-old #MeToo movement flows easily along that “more perfect” evolutionary path. It holds out the promise of stripping away a lingering abuse: the silent existence and acceptance of sexual mistreatment and assault, particularly of women by men in a position of power. In tandem with that are the core values of due process and of weighing evidence fairly to avoid inflicting punishment on the innocent.
Americans in their DNA know sin when they see it. They recognized it in slavery. In the denial of voting rights. In the intolerance of people because of how they worship or whom they love.
But recognizing inequity and washing it away has never been a linear achievement in this country. It has always been two steps forward and one step back, a truly American ritual — or curse — with a long and sometimes bloody history.
Americans slaughtered each other by the hundreds of thousands to end slavery in the 19th century, only to largely squander that blood and treasure in a failed Reconstruction and a century of Jim Crow discrimination.
Women were banished from the voting booth for nearly a century and a half, only then to languish decades longer before grasping only fractions of national power levers (and not yet the presidency).
The testimony of Christine Blasey Ford emboldened countless sexual assault victims to share their own stories. Men bore witness to the lasting emotional damage that sexual abuse can cause. That had value, regardless of the outcome of the Supreme Court battle.
Ultimately, 45 percent of viewers said they believed Ford and 33 percent believed Kavanaugh’s denials. And, ultimately, such she said/he said disputes have to be resolved based on facts, not feelings.
Unmasking the shame and suffering of sexual violence can go a long way toward encouraging victims to step forward sooner, confide in friends and family, and confront their attackers.
In America, about 1 in 6 women experience sexual assault, and 1 out of every 10 rape victims is male. In the wake of #MeToo, a historic number of women — 256 — are running for Congress.
Were the hearings and the outcome a fatal setback for the promises of the movement?
Hardly. That wouldn’t be the American way. History teaches that social change is slow and halting, but it keeps bending toward justice.