sexual assault ... or not

Congressional Washington is currently alight with allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh: Did he did or did he didn't sexually assail a woman thirty years ago and can that woman, who has stepped from the shadows of anonymity, undo his hitherto impeccable credentials to win confirmation? Another political pissing contest, another sexual past, another dust storm of solemn kerfuffle that means so much to those willing to risk so little?

And yet what draws my reading attention this morning is of a rape that is hundreds of years old:

A 17th-century sailor’s confession about a rape, of which he became so ashamed that he sought to cover it up for ever, has been exposed by conservation workers who discovered the note hidden under a rewritten version in his journal....
[Edward Barlow] originally wrote an excruciatingly frank account of his rape of Mary Symons, a young female servant in a house where he was lodging, an encounter he admitted was “much against her will, for indeed she was asleep but being gotten into the bed I could not easily be persuaded out again, and I confess that I did more than what was lawful or civil, but not in that manner that I could ever judge or, in the least, think that she should prove with child, for I take God to witness I did not enter her body, all though I did attempt something in that nature”.

Barlow inserted a line of warning: “I found by her that women’s wombs are of an attractive quality and dangerous for a young man to meddle with.”

Another time. Another sensibility. Another bit of "meddling." Do the two stories deserve to be in the same barrel? I'm not really sure. I just know that the earlier tale caught my attention -- possibly because of the "shame?"

There's little or no shame of any sort in Washington these days. But apparently there was shame in the man's heart so many years ago. The circumscribed delicacy of the earlier language ... a strange matter as it seems today.

Anyway, the two played in my mind this morning.