President Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court exacerbated our nation’s deep partisan divide. It has also profoundly affected my neighbourhood and my church.
My family has lived in Northwest Washington, DC for almost four decades. During all this time, we have gone to the Catholic church that’s a few blocks from our home. My five children attended the neighbourhood Catholic school, where for 17 years, I coached basketball. After graduating, all five went to three different local Catholic high schools.
The elementary school from which my children graduated is the same school that Kavanaugh’s children now attend and where he coaches basketball. We go to the same church. And the high school he attended is the same school where my oldest son went for four years.
With this much in common, you might think that my neighbourhood, my church, and I would be overjoyed that “one of ours” will be an associate justice of the Supreme Court. To the contrary, I am distraught and my church and neighbourhood are deeply divided.
Despite being an upper middle class white community, my neighbourhood is largely liberal and votes Democratic. There are, of course, some prominent Republicans and conservative political figures who live in the area and who go to our church, but they are a distinct minority.
When Kavanaugh was first nominated, the local reaction was mixed. There were those who rushed to support him out of loyalty because he had long been a part of their circle of friends, or because they were simply overcome by the prospect of one of their neighbours being on the highest court in the US. Others did so because their daughters were on one of the teams he coached and they knew him to be a “nice man.”
The justice that Kavanaugh is replacing, though not a liberal, on a number of occasions, provided a balancing vote that kept the court somewhat centred. Kavanaugh, on the other hand, is a partisan Republican. He was part of the team that worked to impeach president Bill Clinton. He served as a close aide to president George W Bush and had been hand-picked for this appointment by the hardline conservative Federalist Society.
By the time Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee were to begin another set of concerns came to the fore. The Democrats on the committee had asked to review all of the nominee’s official communication during his time in the Bush White House. In response, the Trump administration and the Republican leadership of the Senate refused to release 90 per cent of this material. Nevertheless, from the emails and other correspondence that were made available, it became clear that Kavanaugh had lied under oath during an earlier senate hearing. It appeared that he lied about his involvement and awareness of: Republican theft of Senate Democratic staff emails, NSA warrantless wiretaps, and the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo.
This was where the matter stood until the public disclosure of allegations by a Dr Christine Blasey Ford, who in a sworn affidavit stated that while in high school she had been sexually assaulted by a drunken Kavanaugh. What followed were more allegations of excessive drinking and other instances of degrading or sexually aggressive behaviour towards women while he was in college and law school.
Kavanaugh aggravated the situation by bringing 14 little girls from his basketball team in their grade school uniforms to sit in the front at his hearing – presumably to bear silent witness that he was, in fact, “a good man.” Additionally, a few tone-deaf Catholic clergy (including one of our former pastors) decided to give interviews vouching for the nominee’s good character. And when Kavanaugh was confirmed, his Catholic high school sent out a release praising him for living out the school’s motto of living “a life for others.” All of these combined to bring home the hurt and the division created by the Kavanaugh nomination.
Brett Kavanaugh has been sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. That part is over. What’s not over is the pain and the mistrust that is tearing apart America, and my neighbourhood and my church, as well.