Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

hlthe2b

(101,730 posts)
Mon Dec 24, 2018, 10:19 AM Dec 2018

Susan Collins Delivered 2018's Most Shameful Hijacking Of Feminism

(cross-posted from GD)

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-susan-collins-brett-kavanaugh-christine-ford_us_5c1d180be4b05c88b6f82dd5
?ops=scalefit_720_noupscale


The vote was bad enough. Sending a man the majority of Americans believe to have sexually assaulted someone to the court, conferring supreme judicial power to a second fabulist accused of sexual misconduct. Granting this man decisive power over the nation’s current and future female bodies. Swinging open the door for the real backlash against women’s outrage. But she not only sold out women’s bodies to confirm a Supreme Court justice selected explicitly to imprison them in enforced pregnancies: She dressed that vote up as a feminist call to arms.

Sen. Susan Collins could have simply, quietly, disappointingly voted to confirm this man. Instead, she ostentatiously wrapped her confirmation in a false feminine bow, grandstanding on the Senate floor for nearly 45 minutes. She dressed head to toe in taupe, the color of neutrality, and told women that the lesson of Christine Blasey Ford’s lasting trauma is that if Brett Kavanaugh committed such crimes on her 15-year-old body, Ford should have reported it.

Collins, Our Lady of Perpetual Moral Bankruptcy, droned on about how many survivors’ stories she’d heard over the preceding days, aligning herself with the popular rhetoric around believing women. Just not this one, she painstakingly attempted to explain, using debunked junk science, disregarding any credible neuropsychology about how trauma affects memory ― the very science Ford teaches at the university level, and which she explained patiently through her own testimony as her own expert witness.
--snip--
The best argument Collins could find for disbelieving Ford was a theory that one of Kavanaugh’s friends, Ed Whelan, the president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, had floated on Twitter: Sure, she was sexually assaulted, but she must have the wrong guy. Almost immediately, Whelan apologized for this “appalling and inexcusable” lack of judgment in suggesting such a thing, and offered his resignation. But that appalling and inexcusable theory was exactly what Collins cited to tear Ford down and make the case that women must feel empowered to report their own assaults. That’s how incredible her disbelief is. And how cynical her politics. --more at link above--
Latest Discussions»Alliance Forums»History of Feminism»Susan Collins Delivered 2...