Female Accusers Must Be Believed?

Democrats like to talk about a lot about "progress," but on some issues, their position can seem regressive. In 2015, speaking about women who accuse men of sexual misconduct, Hillary Clinton opined:

"I think that when someone makes the claim, they come forward, they should be believed and that is what starts the process and then there is a determination as to what if anything should be done about the claim that was made."

Conservative heads exploded. How could she possibly lecture others about believing female victims? Hillary was already on record slandering Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, and a handful of other accusers of Bill Clinton, calling them "trailer trash," "failed cabaret singer," or simply "bimbo." Hillary Clinton's hypocrisy became the focus of conservative analysis, and few addressed the nefarious nature of the position she was espousing.

Sixty years before Hillary's hypocritical endorsement of the Democratic Party's position on female accusers, a woman named Carolyn Bryant (pictured) claimed she had been sexually mistreated by a 14-year-old black boy named Emmett Till. Carolyn was immediately believed by the Democrats around her, especially her husband and his half-brother. Without a trial or any corroborating evidence, those two men acted on the woman's allegations, and brought the young boy's life to a brutal end.

Mob justice is always evil. Admittedly, the type of mob justice that plagues current politics is nowhere near as nefarious as the kind of mob justice that once infected the Jim Crow South. Supreme Court appointees are under no threat of being lynched, these days, except in a metaphorical sense. And targets of mob outrage are most often members of the racial majority, rather than minorities. However, the internal logic of mob justice is still the same. And it is still evil.

Whatever 14-year-old Emmett Till may have said to Carolyn Bryant in that grocery store, he did not deserve to have his life ended by vigilantes acting on a single woman's allegations. And whatever a drunk 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh may have done with drunk Christine Ford, he does not deserve to have his career ended in the kangaroo court of public opinion.