Is this going to become the new line I wonder? Are men going to come out of the woodwork to say that yes, they too dabbled in rape in their younger days?

What is this? Why does age when it happened matter? Why does the number of intervening years matter? How has that changed what somebody did when they are young?

Is it that you can’t be judged for things you did in your youth? Like you can’t be judged by things you did when you were drunk? Like you can’t be judged by things you did before you changed brands of underwear?

I am no friend of that Stanford swimmer who got caught in an alley dry humping a drunk girl, but is the message we are sending, “Hey, it’s not that you did it, it’s that you were stupid enough to do it where somebody could see you. If you had been smart enough to turn up the music or something you might have been a Supreme Court justice.”

None of us want to be judged for things we have done, especially if we were privileged and our youth was protected by an invisible wall. But we did them. I look back on my youth and I am sickened by some of the things I did (I think nothing compared to what Kavanaugh and Judge did). But I am responsible for them. I do not escape them because of what I did so many years ago.

We send children quite a bit younger than Kavanaugh at the time away for many years when they get caught doing similar things.

Yet we send the message, rape, hurt, steal when you are young. Just don’t get caught at the time. Later, that’s fine. The vagaries of youth and all that.