She shouldn’t be fired. But she should be condemned.
A professor at Georgetown University has stated that the “entitled white” Republican senators who are defending Judge Kavanaugh deserve to die “miserable deaths” and be castrated.
On Saturday, Christine Fair — an associate professor at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service — tweeted:
Look at thus chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement.
All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.
The tweet appears to have since been deleted, but not before it received coverage from outlets including Fox News and The College Fix.
This is far from Fair’s first brush with controversy. As The Fix notes, Fair has previously called German police officers Nazis and harassed a Trump-supporting colleague. What’s more, Fox News reports that she had also referred to the GOP as “filthy swine” and a “f***ing death cult” in a tweetstorm the week prior.
A university spokesperson told Fox News that Fair’s comments are within the bounds of the school’s speech policy.
“Our policy does not prohibit speech based on the person presenting ideas or the content of those ideas, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable,” the spokesperson stated. “While faculty members may exercise freedom of speech, we expect that their classrooms and interaction with students be free of bias and geared toward thoughtful, respectful dialogue.”
Now, I’m not going to say that her comments deserve a firing. As long as she can, as Georgetown demands, operate in the classroom “free of bias,” I believe that she should be able to express herself as she chooses in her free time. Just because comments don’t deserve firing, however, does not mean that they do not deserve condemnation — and these most certainly do.
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t exactly know what to make of the allegations against Kavanaugh. In other cases — such as those against Roy Moore or Bill Clinton — the fact that the people in question are guilty of sexual misconduct has been abundantly clear to me. In this one, however, it hasn’t been so clear — at least not so far.
I am someone who generally errs on the side of believing women (or men) who say that they have been assaulted. After all, why would someone lie? Accusing a person, especially a powerful one, of sexual assault or misconduct is the kind of experience that no one wants to endure. People will doubt you. People will harass you. People will go through your own behavior with a fine-toothed comb, looking for ways in which you may have “asked for it.” Still, I have to admit that the case against Kavanaugh has me confused.
Other than an unnamed mention to a therapist and statements to her husband, Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations have no corroboration. The statements of another woman, Julie Swetnick — which accused Kavanaugh of taking part in brutal gang rapes — seem to be falling apart as she contradicts herself. To me, it just doesn’t seem as clear-cut as some of the allegations against other powerful men. I’m not saying that I know he didn’t do it; I’m simply saying that I don’t know.
With that being said, it’s clear from Fair’s, um, fervent commentary that she believes she does know. This could, of course, simply be because she really wants it to be true — all too often, the accusers of powerful men are weaponized as political pawns by the opposing party — or for some other reason, I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that her comments are still inappropriate and — this may be of more interest to her than her comments’ inappropriateness — completely ineffective. If her goal is (as it should be, if she believes the allegations against Kavanaugh) to get others to also believe them and prevent him from having a seat on the Supreme Court, she should be using her platform in a way that gets others to thoughtfully consider her argument. Let me be clear: Making outlandish, fevered statements about wanting to castrate a group of people and feed their parts to pigs is not the best way to do this. In fact, it is probably the best way to achieve the opposite: making everyone view your as some sort of loony, unhinged nut job and take nothing about your potential points seriously whatsoever.