More than 500 so-called literary figures need to get a life.
Without realizing what a pathetic self-caricature they are creating, these writers, editors, and workers for numerous publishing houses have written a fevered screed demanding that Penguin Random House renege on its deal to publish a forthcoming book by Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
PUBLISHING PROFESSIONALS REBUKE $2M AMY CONEY BARRETT BOOK DEAL AS ‘DESTRUCTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS’
Pretending that they aren’t calling for “a form of censorship,” these people whose very livelihoods depend on free expression claim the mantle of “wider and moral social responsibilities” in order to say Barrett’s expression should be shut down.
And they haven’t even seen her text yet. All that’s known is that Barrett’s purported topic is “how judges are not supposed to bring their personal feelings into how they rule.”
In breathless and lifeless prose, these supposed arbiters of moral social responsibilities are upset that Barrett joined a court majority to overturn the 1973 pro-abortion decision Roe v. Wade: “This is a case where a corporation has privately funded the destruction of human rights with obscene profits.” Barrett supposedly is responsible for “dismantling protections for the human rights to privacy, self-determination, and body autonomy.”
Oh, the horror. Next thing you know, they’ll be saying, Grinch-like, that she’s a “three-decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce.”
And all because Barrett reads the Constitution differently than they do, assuming they actually read the Constitution at all rather than just fulminating about their right to terminate human life. Obviously, they understand not a bit of the Constitution, else they wouldn’t make the ludicrous claim that by smothering a book in its cradle they “have made the decision to stand by our duty of care while upholding freedom of speech. We cannot stand idly by while our industry misuses free speech to destroy our rights.”
How, pray tell, do they uphold free speech by denying it? How does a book they haven’t seen destroy their rights? The book isn’t going to stop abortions or deny them the rights to jury trials or withhold habeas corpus. And it’s certainly not going to keep them from penning silly letters in pursuit of their own free speech rights in order to deny speech by justices with whom they disagree.
One wonders, are all the other profits made by all the publishing houses for which these agonized people work, the profits that pay their own salaries, “obscene?” And do they have absolutely no clue that it is possible for someone to say the Constitution gives many regulatory rights to states rather than the federal government without in any way “inflicting her own religious and moral agenda upon all Americans?” Do they even understand the difference between legislating and judging?
These people in the publishing business are in the wrong line of work if they think the job of a publishing house is not to publish a book, sight unseen, of one of the nine highest-ranking jurists in the nation.
The next groups that should step right up are plumbers against pipes, pilots against aircraft, and cobblers against shoes. Like those fictional cobblers, the publishing industry workers seem to have no soles.
