Judge Amy Coney Barrett is under attack this week from people who really want you to believe she is a religious zealot and faithful servant of the patriarchy.
They are so determined to make this line of attack stick, in fact, that they are pushing different iterations of the same broken narrative, suggesting the judge’s affiliation with a small Christian ecumenical group called People of Praise is proof of her supposed radicalism.
Barrett, who is the front-runner to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is associated with the religious group that served as the inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s decidedly uninspired 1985 series The Handmaid’s Tale, Newsweek falsely claimed this week in a since-amended report.
“Handmaid’s Tale?” asked Reuters in a similarly since-corrected news report. “U.S. Supreme Court candidate’s religious community under scrutiny.”
ABC News’s Tom Llamas said elsewhere that there is “speculation” that the “small charismatic Christian community” to which Barrett is linked “may have inspired the novel and Emmy-award winning drama The Handmaid’s Tale.”
In other words, according to our very good and noble press, the White House intends to put on the Supreme Court a woman whose religious affiliation may or may not have inspired a popular book series about a dystopian patriarchal society where women are treated as the property of men. This supposed detail about Barrett’s personal background, which is irrelevant anyway insofar as her jurisprudence is concerned, would probably be more interesting were it true that People of Praise is the inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale. It is not. Atwood herself said so.
This particularly stupid, anti-Barrett narrative begins with a 2017 New Yorker profile on Atwood, which includes details of how the author researched The Handmaid’s Tale series:
As a brief aside, the New Yorker article includes a misleading statement. The newspaper clipping with the word “handmaidens” underlined comes from an October 1985 Associated Press report, according to NJ.com. By then, Atwood’s book had already been published, NJ.com reports, adding that it “was reviewed twice in the New York Times, in late 1985 and early 1986, on its way to becoming a bestseller.” Atwood may have added the Associated Press story to her research files after her first book published, but it clearly did not inspire the series, though the New Yorker article suggests otherwise.
Anyway, the New Yorker profile never once mentions Barrett. It does, however, mention a “Catholic congregation in New Jersey,” which, based on the Associated Press report, is a group called People of Hope. People of Praise is not the same thing as People of Hope. The apparent confusion over Praise and Hope is what likely led Newsweek to report falsely this week that “Amy Coney Barrett’s People of Praise group inspired ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’” Newsweek updated its report later with an editor’s note clarifying that People of Hope and People of Praise are not, in fact, the same thing. The editor’s note also claims the New Yorker article “mentions” People of Hope. The 2017 profile never once mentions the New Jersey-based group by name.
After Newsweek corrected its story, Reuters brought up the rear, determined to keep the Barrett/Handmaid narrative going with an ever-so-slightly amended iteration of the falsehood.
“Some have likened People of Praise, a self-described charismatic Christian community, to the totalitarian, male-dominated society of Margaret Atwood’s novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’” read the Reuters report’s original opening lines.
That is a hell of a thing to suggest, considering Atwood herself says People of Praise is not the inspiration for her book. Reuters has since amended its story, but the narrative lives on.
“Did Amy Coney Barrett’s Religious Group Inspire The Handmaid’s Tale?” reads a Tuesday Refinery29 headline.
“We know a lot of people have jokingly said that if Trump gets elected – or in this case reelected – that the alternate reality of The Handmaid’s Tale will become real,” the report reads. “While we are still optimistic that it will remain the fiction of books and television, Barrett’s potential nomination to the Supreme Court is concerning.” Sure.
So, let’s do a quick rundown of where we are with this junk Barrett narrative.
The New Yorker reported in 2017 that Atwood drew inspiration for her series from Catholic charismatic groups. Newsweek claimed this meant People of Praise, which is false. Reuters did not go as far as to report the same falsehood as Newsweek. It chose instead to lean on lurid innuendo, suggesting People of Praise may have inspired the book series. Reuters backed away later, leaving us with the lingering narrative that groups like People of Praise directly inspired The Handmaid’s Tale.
In just a few days, we have gone from “People of Praise inspired the book series,” to “People of Praise may have inspired the series,” to “Groups like People of Praise inspired the series.”
Truly, we live in a Golden Era of Journalism.
