Let's pretend for one minute that Christine Blasey Ford's facts-not-required accusations are truthful and that she was sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh, or really anyone, some three decades past.  With due sympathies to the past, is there any cause by which one can regard Ford's present method of making her charges as immoral?

Consider the following:

1. The obvious issue is the 36-year delay.  Anyone who has watched even a few episodes of NCIS: Special Victims Unit over the last twenty years has seen a few episodes where the dedicated Mariska Hargetay character tries to convince an unsteady rape victim of the moral imperative to identify her rapist to protect more women from violation.  Professor Blasey Ford has at no time in the past felt this moral imperative – her memory did not prod her even once until a doctor's session in 2012.  That indicates a certain lack of internal moral fiber, even if it's true.

2. No evidence.  What has the professor done to gather some evidence so as not to waste people's time with an otherwise wholly unsupportable accusation?  Apparently nothing.  Blasey Ford expects our highly trained FBI servants to put citizen tax dollars to work assigning themselves to an investigation (inappropriately) for which she can provide no leads.  Public accusation without evidence is brazen and immoral.  Even if it's true.

3. Blasey Ford has perfect timing in announcing her restored, if completely unexaminable, recollections.  Having been a public activist for forces opposed to everything Brett Kavanaugh represents (like the Constitution, judicial restraint, and presumed innocence), she shows no concern about the appearance of ulterior motives.  She has made no attempt even to pre-empt the opportunistic appearance with some statement like "I know how this may look to some, but..."  This does not occur to her, and that is moral cluelessness.  Even if it's true. 

4. No memory of where and when it happened.  Two points.  First, the Kennedy assassinations, the Twin Towers.  Do you remember where you witnessed them?  Have you ever been in a car crash?  Are the details still in your brain cells?  Such things are not easily forgotten or suppressed when delivered in single shocking doses.  Blasey Ford's experience was not the trauma of a child subjected to prolonged parental abuse, where suppression takes place as a coping mechanism.  If she was drunk, memory erasure due to intoxication does not reverse itself three decades later.  Second, she belongs to a profession that generally requires more than average abilities at recall, mental organization, and expression.  Those who become professors typically have such talents – unless they are not really teaching, but only spouting leftist doctrinal pabulum.  So this professor doesn't even have her own memory to support her charges – and yet she charges anyway.  Immoral.  Even if...

5. Claiming credibility by polygraph.  It's not and cannot be evidence, and she knows it.  Polygraphs only measure certain physio-emotional responses that may resemble the physio-emotional responses associated with a troubled, lying individual.  A lie per se cannot be isolated by this kind of test.  Worse, some minds can beat the polygraph.  We call them, using a term from Blasey Ford's profession, sociopaths.  Claiming objective truth via polygraph, absent any other factual evidence, is, for someone who should know better, highly unethical. 

So the answer to the question: Can a true victim also be immoral? 

The answer is yes.

Don't expect for one second the Christine Blasey Fords, the Sandra Flukes, the Anita Hills, and their ilk ever to refrain from using their victimhood stories to immorally advance their causes and their careers.  Even if their stories are (or were) true.

Image: Montanasuffragettes via Wikimedia Commons.