Rush to bypass due process

Recently, ABC News commentator Matthew Dowd made the following statement on Twitter:

“Enough with the ‘he said, she said’ storyline. If this is he said, she said, then let’s believe the she in these scenarios. She has nothing to gain, and everything to lose. For 250 years, we have believed the he in these scenarios. Enough is enough.”

As far as the toxic waste dump of social media is concerned, it was rather innocuous.

But the more I read it, the truly noxious and subversive nature of Dowd’s sentiments became apparent: He was saying “believe the woman who says she was raped, regardless of the evidence.”

He was urging us to believe the woman for several reasons, but the most important one was historical: For the past 250 years, ever since George Washington apparently stuck his tongue down Betsy Ross’s throat in appreciation for her flag design, women have been victims of the patriarchy.

And so, to balance out the scales, we should now accept their narratives of abuse hook, line and sinker - even if there is little corroboration. That’s remedial justice, a la Dowd.

And he is not alone in his thinking. Many people think it’s abusive in and of itself to question the stories of self-professed victims.

The most famous one these days is Christine Blasey Ford, who said Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh shoved her onto a bed in a drunken fury and tried to rip her clothes off 35 years ago.

This column isn’t really about Ford or Kavanaugh, except to the extent that the incident demonstrates the dangerous road we set upon when demanding that women be believed, reflexively and absolutely.

This column is about something bigger, and that is the growing willingness on a large part of the electorate to appease women by neutralizing due process.

Make no mistake: This is not about all victims of abuse. This is not about the young boys who were molested by priests in my church, or the young men who were victims of Jerry Sandusky. This is uniquely about women, and about this supposed debt that society owes us for, according to Dowd, having “believed the ‘he.’”

This is about the fraudulent attempt to make amends by giving us the power to strip others of their constitutional right to due process, and their natural right to an unsullied reputation. This is about demanding acceptance of the principle that women don’t lie, because they have no reason to.

Since Dowd is so concerned with history, let’s examine that theory.

In 1931, nine black teenagers were falsely accused by two white women of raping them in Scottsboro, Ala. They were convicted by an all-white jury, appealed, and convicted again on retrial. It was only after their case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court six years later that the convictions were overturned.

On Aug. 28, 1955, a 14 year old boy by the name of Emmett Till was accused of having sexually assaulted a white woman by grabbing her and making “lewd advances.”

He was abducted by the family of the white woman, who had lied, and brutally murdered.

On Nov. 28, 1987, Tawana Brawley claimed that white men, including a police officer and a prosecutor, had raped her. The Rev. Al Sharpton and other prominent African Americans like Bill Cosby, Don King and Mike Tyson defended Brawley. One year later, in 1988, a grand jury found that she had lied.

On May 12, 2006, three lacrosse players from Duke University were charged with having raped an African-American stripper named Crystal Gail Mangum.

Professors at the school urged a conviction and the district attorney manipulated the case for political ends, but the charges were dropped a year later and the three were pronounced “actually innocent.”

There are more cases of women who shouldn’t have been believed. The UVA rape hoax. The Columbia University “Mattress Girl” hoax. The recent case of a priest in Berks county falsely accused of sexual assault.

Matthew Dowd thinks women are entitled to blind faith. I suggest he read Santayana.