Judge Amy Coney Barrett is the front-runner to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.
Barrett is a mother of seven. She is also a devout Roman Catholic.
Prepare yourself for a deluge of anti-Catholic hysteria from Democratic lawmakers, left-wing activists, and their allies in the press. The closer Barrett comes to sitting on the Supreme Court, the more desperate and uglier the anti-Catholic and anti-family attacks will become. In fact, with reports that Barrett is already the Trump administration’s first choice for the court, the Know-Nothing histrionics have begun already.
“Your handmaiden has arrived,” noted grifter and MSNBC regular Richard Painter said this weekend, referring to the book series by Margaret Atwood. “Welcome to the Republic of Gilead.”
A mother of seven is under serious consideration for the most powerful court in the most powerful country in the world, just like in a dystopian patriarchal society. Oppressive indeed.
Elsewhere, the Washington Post’s Ron Charles seemed shocked to discover that Barrett is a faithful adherent to a basic tenet of Christianity.
“Amy Coney Barrett,” Charles said on social media, “the judge at the top of Trump’s list to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has said we should always remember that a ‘legal career is but a means to an end … and that end is building the Kingdom of God.’”
Yes, this is a thing that Christians believe; that everything they do is for the glory of God. This is a dog-bites-man headline, yet Charles appears to believe it is a legitimate scoop. It boggles the mind that so many in the press seem to be so ignorant of the core beliefs of a faith that boasts some 2.4 billion adherents.
The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, characterized Barrett elsewhere as a “devout Catholic [who] has expressed a willingness to overturn Supreme Court precedents.” That is one way to describe the judge’s legal disagreements with poorly reasoned decisions.
“Yeah, how dare we ask questions about Amy Barrett’s religious commitments,” said BuzzFeed News’s Joe Bernstein, sharing passages from a 2017 New York Times report about the judge’s affiliation with the People of Praise, a Catholic charismatic group. “After reading this I’m positive the right will defend her, and her jurisprudence, on identity grounds.”
Either that or they will simply be responding to faith-based attacks on Barrett, including the one Bernstein leveled.
In response to the BuzzFeed News reporter’s endorsement of a religious litmus test for Barrett, Vanity Fair contributing editor Franklin Leonard took it a step further, predicting that placing the Catholic judge on the Supreme Court would usher in a real-life version of The Handmaid’s Tale.
“I hope everyone who mocked the ‘Handmaid’s Tale could happen tomorrow’ folks feel appropriately ashamed of themselves,” he said. “But that would require being capable of shame.”
The headline of an article featured on Yahoo! Life reads, “This Is Amy Coney Barrett, The Potential RBG Replacement Who Hates Your Uterus.” The article itself warns that “Barrett is a practicing Roman Catholic and mother of seven” who is “well-known throughout conservative circles for putting her religious convictions at the forefront of her work and identity.”
It is a bit obvious what the play is here.
The strategy is to portray Barrett as a fundamentalist wackadoodle. The strategy is to portray her as a brainwashed handmaiden of the patriarchy or whatever. These characterizations will grow increasingly anti-Catholic and increasingly frantic the closer Barrett gets to the nomination.
Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Kamala Harris of California, Chuck Schumer of New York, and Dick Durbin of Illinois have shown already that they have no problem going all-in on the anti-papist stuff when it comes to Catholic judicial nominees. In fact, Feinstein specifically challenged Barrett’s qualifications to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, suggesting the nominee is maybe a little too Catholic for the job.
The “dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein told Barrett in 2017.
Sixteen years prior, Feinstein, Durbin, and Schumer played footsie with anti-Catholic bigotry when they questioned Judge William Pryor’s “deeply held beliefs.”
If Barrett is the nominee, expect more of this and worse from Democrats and their allies. By the time we get to the confirmation process (if there is one), the official line will be that Barrett is some sort of Cult Leader Breeder — like Charles Manson with a stroller.
