The accusations against the Supreme Court nominee are being assessed under different social and cultural conventions than when the episode allegedly occurred<\/b>
\nIt was 36 years ago. The accusation: There was a party, alcohol. A 17-year-old boy was drunk and started groping a 15-year-old girl, pinning her down and covering her mouth so she couldn\u2019t scream. Today, she doesn\u2019t remember some of the details. He insists it didn\u2019t happen at all.
It was 36 years ago. The culture: What 15-year-old girl would tell her parents she had been at a party where kids had been drinking, much less that a boy had attacked her?
It was 36 years ago. The country: Ronald Reagan was president. The Supreme Court had only one female associate justice, its first, Sandra Day O\u2019Connor. It was nine years before the Clarence Thomas hearings, where the spectacle of an all-male Senate panel casting doubt upon Anita Hill would provoke the outrage that drove a record number of women to run for \u2014 and win \u2014 congressional office.
A very different United States is now deep into a debate over how long-ago allegations involving teenagers and alcohol should be regarded and treated in the confirmation process of the accused, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, in his nomination to the Supreme Court.
It\u2019s unclear where the confrontation is headed: the Senate Judiciary Committee has called both Judge Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, to testify before the Senate Monday, but she has not committed to appearing.
Both Democrats and Republicans have to carefully consider how their response affects their strategy just seven weeks before a midterm election where women are crucial voters. Democrats have to worry about older women and those who have raised teenagers, who may be skeptical that an allegation from adolescence should doom a person as an adult, no matter what they think of this pick by President Trump. Republicans have to be mindful of generational shift that has made the country far more vigilant on matters of sexual misconduct, and of the women demanding that the allegations made by Dr. Blasey, now a research psychologist in Northern California, be taken seriously.
No matter their differing viewpoints, scholars, advocates for women\u2019s rights, politicians and others see enormous consequence in reckoning with adolescent behavior during a high court fight in an unusually combustible election year.\u201d
\u201cThis is going to come back to bite women, I promise you,\u201d said Kay Hymowitz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and the author of \u201cManning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys.\u201d \u201cTeenage girls do crazy, stupid things also. Even if they have not attempted a rape, they will have done other stupid things. There\u2019s a lot of confusion about what we expect of kids, boys and girls, when it comes to sex.\u201d
Others argued that while it is reasonable to put the allegations in context \u2014 if they are true, he was just a teenager, that argument goes \u2014 Judge Kavanaugh is not up for an ordinary job.
\u201cI would be very troubled if someone were about to go to jail for something like this that happened 40 years ago,\u201d said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who has written extensively in defense of women\u2019s rights in sexual harassment and sexual assault. Still, she said, \u201cWith respect to the Supreme Court you\u2019re dealing with an elite position which is a privilege to be confirmed for. And arguably the standards are much higher.\u201d
Judge Gartner noted that she had raised two teenagers \u2014 \u201cteenage boys are nuts,\u201d she said \u2014 and she has seen how allegations, even when found to be false, can unfairly tarnish young men. Last year, she and three other Harvard Law School professors urged the Department of Education to reassess Obama-era guidance to colleges on dealing with allegations of sexual assault, arguing they had encouraged colleges to adopt definitions of misconduct that are \u201cseriously overbroad.\u201d
\u201cShould she be believed? I don\u2019t know,\u2019\u2019 she said. \u201cWhat does one do about an accusation that is this old? I\u2019m not sure. But you\u2019re talking about a different kind of position.\u201d
Much hangs in the balance. Judge Kavanaugh would fill what has been a swing seat on the court, and would likely be a decisive vote on for a strengthened conservative majority. The midterm elections on Nov. 6 could flip control of the Senate, giving Democrats the power to veto any of Mr. Trump\u2019s nominees for the next two years.
The allegations also come in a defining political moment for women, who are energized as voters and running for Congress in record numbers \u2014 in both cases, mostly as Democrats. It\u2019s far different than 1991, when Ms. Hill reluctantly made allegations of sexual harassment against Judge Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The male senators who cast doubt on her were a bipartisan group \u2014 almost unthinkable in today\u2019s polarized setting. And a cultural reckoning on sexual assault in recent years \u2014 in the Catholic Church, in elite boarding schools, and in the highest ranks of Hollywood \u2014 has established that crimes committed several decades ago are crimes all the same.
At the very least, politicians now understand that a woman\u2019s allegations needs to be heard, and that most women would have a hard time coming forward. Dr. Blasey has said that it was only years later, while in therapy, that she fully understood the attack as attempted rape, and she still struggled for months over making the allegations public, knowing that women who make such allegations open themselves up to shaming and doubt.
None of those senators casting doubt on Ms. Hill \u2014 Republican or Democrat \u2014 saw the reaction coming: how anger among women turned the 1992 midterms into the so-called \u201cYear of the Woman.\u201d
This year, the outrage was there well before Judge Kavanaugh was even nominated: It started with Hillary Clinton\u2019s loss in 2016 and swelled through the women\u2019s marches and the #MeToo movement. \u201cWe\u2019re not looking at this as being the spark of mobilization, we\u2019re looking at this as being the fuel on top of an already burning fire,\u201d said Corrine McConnaughy, who teaches political science at George Washington University and public policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
\u201cDemocratic sitting senators who might have personal reasons to be dismissive of a sexual assault claim from several decades ago have constituent concerns they didn\u2019t know existed in \u201992,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re more aware of how Democratic women in particular are viewing this and they\u2019re also increasingly aware that women are fueling the Democratic Party.\u201d
Mr. Kavanaugh and his Republican sponsors seemed aware of the climate, too: he took pains to present himself at his hearings as a champion of female law clerks and a coach to young female athletes. He insisted that he considered Roe v. Wade settled law.
But in the face of the allegations from Dr. Blasey, Republicans may see some benefit to doubling down on polarization and gender division.
Already, some were stoking what Dr. McConnaughy called a \u201ccareful, all the ladies are coming for you\u201d strategy.
Politico quoted an anonymous lawyer \u201cclose to the White House\u201d as saying, \u201cIf somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.\u201d Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah suggested Dr. Blasey was \u201cmistaken\u201d in her recollections.
Conservatives argued that liberals have long protested that young black men are too often consigned to prison for isolated crimes committed when they were teenagers. \u201cAt what point do we hold an individual duly responsible for his or her actions?\u201d Ms. Hymowitz said. \u201cWe have a long history in this country and in other modern countries of seeing minors as requiring a different set of rules and frankly more leniency.\u201d
\u201cI don\u2019t believe all boys do this, but I think a lot did, and some of them were not bad kids and are perfectly upstanding adults now,\u201d she said. \u201cI am not comfortable with derailing a much-hated nominee \u2013 hated for other reasons – because this happened to pop up as a possible way to get him.\u201d
Opponents of Judge Kavanaugh noted that last year, he denied a 17-year-old immigrant seeking an abortion, forcing her to live with the consequences of her teenage behavior.
\u201cCall me crazy, but I think having 17 year-olds worry that any sexual assault they commit now might follow them around for the rest of their lives would be a GREAT thing,\u201d Ben Wexler, a television writer, wrote on Twitter on Monday.
Dr. McConnaughy, the George Washington professor, is 41, and was too young to vote when Anita Hill testified before the Senate. She has her students watch recordings of those hearings every year, and they are often shocked by what they see, she said. To those younger voters, there is less willingness to forgive allegations even from long ago. \u201cI think we have new language, new tool kits, to push back on \u2018kids will be kids\u2019 and \u2018boys will be boys,\u2019\u201d she said.
\u201cI don\u2019t expect this to be a replay of Anita Hill,\u201d she added. With those allegations, \u201cthe primary thing was, Is this going to undo Thomas. I don\u2019t think the primary thing now is if this is going to undo Kavanaugh. That\u2019s a story, but the primary thing is, what\u2019s the script each side is going to offer?\u201d<\/p>\n

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