Last year Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford at a high school party. The media went berserk and activists with no tolerance for sexual assault accusations protested Kavanaugh’s nomination.
The controversy led Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey to express his hope that the American people did not lose sight of the “moral moment.” At first, I thought the moral moment was for a sexual assault victim to tell her story without her reputation being destroyed.
But when Sen. Booker stated: We have to ask ourselves is Kavanaugh the right person…Not whether he’s innocent or guilty, this is not a trial, but has enough questions been raised that we should just move on to another candidate. That made me ask myself, how could it not matter whether Kavanaugh was innocent or guilty? That’s the only thing that matters when the accusation is sexual assault. Senator Booker’s premise, along with suggesting enough questions were raised to seek another Supreme Court nominee, created a moral dilemma in itself.
Was the senator claiming it was morally justified to allow accusations to disqualify? Now, suppose Kavanaugh was guilty, was the senator claiming it was morally justified to discredit an adult for a teenage infraction? This was unprecedented. It challenged the presumption of innocence, set uncharted areas of investigation, and ignored the most important part of human development—maturation.
But this moral dilemma wasn’t settled because the issue was never sexual assault in the first place. Senator Booker’s “moral moment” was actually a “moral panic attack” over conservatives having the majority vote in the Supreme Court. This threatened the constitutional protection of reproductive freedom for women, and the moral outrage about sexual assault was actually a tactic to get the Republicans to reconsider their Supreme Court selection. (After the death of Justice Scalia, the Republicans refused to hold hearings for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. Their reason was it was Obama’s last year in office. This was also unprecedented and a Democratic retaliation was inevitable.)
Recently, in Virginia, a bill was proposed to loosen restrictions on third trimester abortions and conservatives had their own “moral panic attack” after Virginia’s Governor, Ralph Northam (D), discussed third trimester abortions on a radio program.
The governor said, “And it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s non-viable. So, in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
The conservative consensus was that Governor Northam defended born-alive abortions.
The governor’s communication director issued this statement to ward off the criticism: Republicans in Virginia and across the country are trying to play politics with women’s health, and that is exactly why these decisions belong between a woman and her physician, not legislators, most of whom are men. No woman seeks a third trimester abortion except in the case of tragic or difficult circumstances, such as a nonviable pregnancy or in the event of severe fetal abnormalities, and the governor’s comments were limited to the actions physicians would take in the event that a woman in those circumstances went into labor.
This was a legitimate moral moment not a public service announcement by a Senator.
But a picture on Governor Ralph Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page showed two students, one in blackface beside another student in a KKK outfit with a caption that said: There are more old drunks than old doctors in this world so I think I’ll have another beer.
The media went berserk and activists were relieved to display their moral outrage at a racially offensive photograph, because the moral dilemma about late-term abortion was outside their comfort zone. This time the American people didn’t have to lose sight of the moral moment—it was aborted by blackface.
(J. Pharoah Doss is a contributor to the New Pittsburgh Courier.)
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