If Democrats in the Senate push against SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s religious convictions or practices, they are unlikely to make much headway, and will almost certainly pay the price for it on the campaign trail and at the polls.
‘Do you have concerns about the group?’ wrote the Guardian US journalist – hopefully, no doubt – in an email I received on Saturday morning. The moment I read the email I knew the paper was out to discredit The People of Praise Christian group, of which Trump’s Supreme Court judge nominee Amy Coney Barrett is a long standing member.
This slightly wacky ecumenical American group, founded in 1971, is being portrayed as a ‘cult’ in some mainstream media quarters due to calling its leaders ‘handmaidens’ and claims of a ‘highly authoritarian’ hierarchical structure. The ‘handmaiden’ labelling was, I should add, dropped because of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women become state property, gave negative connotations.
The group has found itself centre-stage ever since it emerged that Barrett, a 48-year-old appellate judge, is a ‘faithful Catholic’. That she is being lined up to replace the iconic liberal rights pioneer Ruth Bader Ginsberg in the Supreme Court has provoked much liberal anger.
But such anger will need to be ‘managed’. If left unchecked it could play into Trump’s hands by causing a backlash if Barrett’s critics come across as bigoted, pursuivant-style ‘anti-Catholics’.
This slightly wacky ecumenical American group, founded in 1971, is being portrayed as a ‘cult’ in some mainstream media quarters due to calling its leaders ‘handmaidens’ and claims of a ‘highly authoritarian’ hierarchical structure.
This is exactly what happened in 2017 when California senator Dianne Feinstein appeared to cast doubt on Barrett’s ability to do her job impartially when she was being approved for her appeals court seat. Democrats found themselves being pilloried by conservatives — not only by conservatives — for being anti-religion and anti-Catholic.
If senior Democrats try to demonise married, family religious types — Barrett is a mother of seven — it could cost the them sacks of votes, even if Biden, who is also courting Catholics, is walking around with a rosary and genuflects when the cameras are on him.
Her legal writings have now come under forensic scrutiny, especially in regards to Catholic judges ruling in potential execution cases. Barrett stated that “judges cannot — nor should they try to — align our legal system with the Church’s moral teaching whenever the two diverge. They should, however, conform their own behavior to the Church’s standard.”
Thus Barrett’s likely appointment has again raised the issue – to her liberal critics at least – of how a Supreme Court judge can be impartial when she is a ‘devout’ Catholic with firm beliefs. Although she admits to being an ‘originalist’ — which means she takes the US Constitution according to the original intent of the Framers as expressed in the literal text of the document as written, and is not controlled by case law precedent — she denies that her faith would “bear in the discharge of [her] duties as a judge”.
Liberals are choking at this idea and already there is talk of Roe v. Wade (the 1973 Supreme Court case that legalised abortion throughout the US) being revisited. The Sunday Times headline after Trump confirmed the nomination was ‘Amy Coney Barrett gets supporters hoping for return of abortion wars’.
Such talk only stokes the media flames and helps move the media narrative away from Trump’s handling of Covid. There is a view in the Beltway that Trump will use Barrett’s Catholic faith – or ‘values’ – as an ace card to mobilise the Christian vote to win another term.
If senior Democrats try to demonise married, family religious types — Barrett is a mother of seven — it could cost the them sacks of votes, even if Biden, who is also courting Catholics, is walking around with a rosary and genuflects when the cameras are on him.
The furore will help Trump not just in the Bible Belt states but, more crucially, across the Midwest swing states (including Wisconsin and Michigan) with many Italian, Irish (as well as Hispanics in Florida and Arizona) that were so important to his win in 2016, a win that his supporters claimed was due to ‘the hand of God’.
Trump’s supporters see Ginsberg’s death as another example of this God-is-a-Republican narrative that plays to his Evangelical Christian base. Barrett herself has said that her background as a lawyer – she trained as a clerk to arch Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia – was just a ‘means to the end of serving God’, and that her true mission in life was ‘building the kingdom of God’.
So the stakes couldn’t be higher. If Trump can get her nomination confirmed in record time, and approved, before November this will be seen as a major win. Expect to see Trump pull out all the stops. He has already described installing Barrett in record time as being a ‘great victory’.
Democrats will find this dilemma over whether to attack her Catholic values a nightmare predicament.
You know when a US election story has genuine significance when it is turned into a special report in The Sun. All the British tabloid could dredge up, however, was that the group of just 1700 odd members — you can fit that many into Westminster cathedral — were of ‘multiple different denominations including Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians and other denominational and nondenominational Christians’. Wow.
People of Praise is not a ‘cult’. It is not even not exclusively Catholic. The attempt to make People of Praise look like some fundamentalist Da Vinci Code cult is all part of an effort to destabilize Barrett’s credentials as a pretty normal stay-at-home mum and lawyer turned law professor at Notre Dame University.
William Cash is a journalist, editor, and publisher. He is chairman of the Catholic Herald board of directors.
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