Richard Doerflinger
Confirmation of a new justice for the U.S. Supreme Court has been halted, at least temporarily, by an accusation that the nominee when 17 years old tried to force himself on a 15-year-old girl. (A second accusation may delay the confirmation process further.)
I have no special knowledge of the cases. The nominee’s accusers seem sincere in their claims, as does the nominee in denying them; and as I write this, senators are trying to work out how to proceed. I cite the dispute to make a broader point.
It seems Sen. Dianne Feinstein held onto the first allegation until the last minute, and now wants an FBI investigation, to run out the clock until the midterm elections when Democrats hope to take over the Senate.
Earlier in these hearings, she allowed her commitment to “abortion rights” to derail her attention to facts, claiming that between 200,000 and 1.2 million women died from illegal abortions in the two decades before the Supreme Court’s 1973 abortion decision. (According to federal data, total abortion-related maternal deaths in those years could be as many as 324 annually, but in 1972 the number from illegal abortions was 40.)
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Nor do Republicans have clean hands. They blocked confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee in the last year of the Obama administration, for much the same reason — they hoped to do better in the upcoming election. And conservatives at one point leaped on a claim that the Trump nominee’s first accuser had negative student evaluations at the college where she teaches — until it turned out they had the wrong college and the wrong teacher.
Largely ignored here is a principle cited by Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz, who leads the U.S. bishops’ efforts to defend religious liberty, when he gave a Sept. 12 lecture on that topic in Washington: “A rightly ordered politics needs to be undergirded not by raw power that imposes, but rather by the process of seeking the truth together.”
That principle may seem unrealistic. In his book, “The Righteous Mind,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt cites evidence that most people arrive at their moral judgments first by intuition, then rationalize why they feel that way. And many political judgments begin with allegiance to a party or “tribe,” followed by seeking the facts to support my tribe’s vision of reality.
When we want to believe something, we find evidence assuring us that we can believe it; when we don’t want to, we question why we must believe it.
As an account of human nature in general, this is open to question — it is largely based on interviews with people already immersed in our modern culture. But it describes current politics well. What is now growing is an inability or unwillingness to listen to any account coming from someone from a different tribe — or even to show that person basic respect.
According to Arthur Brooks, former president of the American Enterprise Institute, our politics has moved beyond disagreement and even anger to thrive on “contempt,” by which he means “the conviction of the worthlessness of another human being.”
As St. John Paul II warned us, abandoning the search for a common truth means that freedom is about imposing our will on others, and politics is about getting people with a different view out of our way (“The Gospel of Life,” Nos. 19, 96).
That means the death of true freedom, including religious freedom. Even as the church discusses how to address its own crises and divisions, including the sex abuse crisis, we must be vigilant in valuing truth over our party loyalties.
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Doerflinger worked for 36 years in the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He writes from Washington state.
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This article makes an important point about the harm caused by the extreme partisanship we see in political discourse today. But the author could not have chosen a more inappropriate example. Tax reform, health care reform, anything would have been better. The Catholic Church has nothing to say to any of us- especially Catholics- about how we should feel about sex abuse allegations. I certainly would never look to the Church for guidance on this. This article is really tone deaf.
Where is the accountability of the media — always there to repeat accusations without verification — and in some cases finally”walking back” some of their stories when those stories prove to have no basis at all — but when the damage is already done.