07 October 2018

The Senate Confirmation Hearing - an Opinion

I almost decided not to comment on the Senate confirmation hearing process.  But a friend motivated me to post my perspective.  A lot of folks will not like what I say, but I am saying it anyway.  What I am not going to comment on is Judge Kavanaugh's  suitability to be confirmed as a SCOTUS Justice because I do not know and neither does the public - especially after the brouhaha of trial by media.  We hire our Senators to make those decisions, with our advice when we have opinions and/or know enough about a subject to provide applicable facts that pertain to the issues.

A complaint I direct at the Senate is the matter of not having followed proper procedure which 1) resulted in withholding records Senators needed, or making it  difficult for them to access additional records within the allotted time before the scheduled vote, and 2) not dealing with the original issue brought to their attention with the privacy ordinarily provided to insure that the type of unwarranted damage done, all the way around, does not occur.

I stopped watching the news after Friday.  It was primarily an effort the entire time to create cognitive dissonance  which used women's issues as a weapon to create obstacles that redirected the process of the hearing. It also unnecessarily triggered a lot of women who have genuinely suffered from sexual harassment, assault, rape, and violence of all types, then worse were not believed when they did report the incidents. Every woman who has endured that knows the perpetrator will target and do harm to additional women in the future.

There were two issues 1) a Senate confirmation hearing that did not follow proper procedure, and 2) a lot of women righteously angry about the system I refer to as "weaponized sex" which is based on societally entrenched institutional  problems and attitudes in our nation which demonstrate the unwarranted belief that women are supposed to be controlled in more rigorous and in less trusted ways than the controls to which men are subject.  

And I think it is a crying shame and a disservice to all women that whoever organized the women creating mob drama encouraged them to behave like  hysterical, irrational women, throwing group tantrums who needed to be controlled!  It was humiliating to have  the negative ways women are  accused of,  being capitalized on to primarily serve the purpose of further convincing men that women, in general, do need to be controlled.

At issue is that women rarely win any publicly politicized "battle of the sexes" especially when waged in the way it has been.

At issue is that the hearing was hijacked by women's issues through trial by media with the public being judge and jury, because the Senate did not follow proper procedure.

These are two mutually exclusive issues, and in trying to force the vote into being for or against women's issues, the Senate confirmation hearing was hijacked, not simply delayed. 

Do I think the women's issues need to be effectively dealt with?  You bet your life, I do.  And you should think so too.  I also think that Judge Kavanaugh, and anyone else who might have been put through the confirmation process, instead, should not have been made victim of that unresolved, ongoing, clearly apparent need.  Truth be told, it had the effect of making a "martyr" of him  which probably created enough sympathy to make a difference in the how some Senators voted.  It may have been an unexpected outcome by those who promoted the effort to hijack the hearing.