Susan Collins Delivered 2018's Most Shameful Hijacking Of Feminism
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-susan-collins-brett-kavanaugh-christine-ford_us_5c1d180be4b05c88b6f82dd5
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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.
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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--
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how any woman could be such a sell-out, I don't care what the party affiliation.
If she thinks women or men who support feminism will forget this, she is sorely mistaken.
As a public speaking instructor, I was aghast at how she chose to do that speech. I could go on and on for paragraphs why it was a bad idea, but I'll settle for making one point. This politician thought she could make a point using her version of logic and she thought she could rationalize or convince. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. In such a emotionally charged atmosphere (and seeing a rapist installed on the Supreme Court is indeed an emotionally distressing experience, especially to survivors), there was no way anyone was going to listen to that, even if it had sound logic, which it did not.
