While the breakneck political news cycle has moved on from the Kavanaugh hearings, a new poll commissioned by McLaughlin & Associates for Independent Women's Voice shows the legacy of the hearing is not as short-lived as the media’s attention span.
Over 40 percent of men in the survey said they would rather be accused of murder than of sexual assault. When combined with the additional 38 percent that responded that they didn’t know which they would prefer, that’s a number four times higher than say they would rather be accused of sexual misconduct (22 percent). Yes, almost four in five men either find the question difficult, or would outright prefer to be accused of taking another human life than of groping a co-worker.
These shocking numbers may be explained by the respondents’ answers to another question: 57 percent of all surveyed, men and women, said that in today’s post-Kavanaugh world, they believe that men accused of sexual misconduct are presumed guilty. Americans watched Judge – now Justice – Kavanaugh fail to be granted, at least by Senators of the minority party, the presumption of innocence that has been the standard in Anglo-American law and culture for centuries.
But a minority – those that urge us to “believe all women” – are quickly moving even beyond the “guilty until proven innocent” standard of those hearings. The New York Times published an op-ed just last week arguing that all men are guilty for the alleged climate of sexism that leads to sexual violence. The author, George Yancy, urges men to take responsibility for the “soul murder” that takes place “under the yoke of our self-serving construction of a violent, pathetic, and problematic masculinity.”
In the freest, most prosperous country in the world, in which female unemployment recently hit a 65-year low, we used to ignore such self-flagellating nonsense as the product of a fringe band of loons. Given that Justice Kavanaugh’s unimpeachable, decades-long reputation as a man who gave the women around him both respect and the opportunity to rise is in tatters for the rest of his life, we no longer have the luxury to ignore arguments like Yancy’s. That fringe is now in control, not only of the universities, but also, as we saw during the hearings, of a large part of the Democratic Party.
Unfortunately, as the McLaughlin survey shows, the mainstreaming of radical feminist ideas about sexual assault, including the overly-broad definition of lack of consent and the nonexistent requirement for evidence, has already begun to drive a wedge between men and women in both the personal and professional contexts.
But there is some hope: the same McLaughlin survey found that only 17 percent of respondents agreed that a person should be denied future jobs based on unsupported allegations of sexual assault against him. Thus far, watching college campus Title IX kangaroo courts metastasize into the political arena has horrified men and women from across the political spectrum, regardless of what they may have believed about Kavanaugh personally. Other polls back this conclusion, with 76 percent of respondents in a recent Pew survey indicating that false claims of sexual assault or harassment are at least some level of problem in our workplaces.
It’s time for the silent majority on this issue to speak up. Men and women both must reject a hostile identity politics that pits husbands against wives, mothers against sons, and coworkers against each other in a sexual battle royale. The scourge of sexual violence is not nearly as widespread as some commonly-cited statistics claim, but it is real. But it is best battled by men and women united against perpetrators and predators, within the bounds of the long-established principles of justice that have made America great.