Meet the New Judge: Amy Coney Barrett

Say hello to your new moral enforcer,  

whether you like it or not

Judge Barrett is a real Christian cult freak. America is in for decades of self-righteous moral outrage and vengeful fixing of things that she believes evil secularism broke, especially legalized abortion and legalized same-sex marriage. The New York Times writes: 

“Judge Barrett is from the South and Midwest. Her career has been largely spent teaching while raising seven children, including two adopted from Haiti and one with Down syndrome, and living according to her faith. She has made no secret of her beliefs on divisive social issues such as abortion. A deeply religious woman, her roots are in a populist movement of charismatic Catholicism.

From her formative years in Louisiana to her current life in Indiana, Judge Barrett has been shaped by an especially insular religious community, the People of Praise, which has about 1,650 adult members, including her parents, and draws on the ecstatic traditions of charismatic Christianity, like speaking in tongues.

The group has a strict view of human sexuality that embraces once-traditional gender roles, such as recognizing the husband as the head of the family. The Barretts, however, describe their marriage as a partnership.

Around the time of her appeals court confirmation, several issues of the group’s magazine, “Vine & Branches,” that mentioned her or her family were removed from the People of Praise website.

She has made clear she believes that life begins at conception, and has served in leadership roles for People of Praise, and her children’s school has said in its handbook that marriage is between a man and a woman. Her judicial opinions indicate broad support for gun rights and an expanded role for religion in public life.

‘Amy Coney Barrett is everything the current incarnation of the conservative legal movement has been working for — someone whose record, and the litmus tests of the president nominating her, suggest will overturn Roe, strike down the A.C.A., bend the law toward big business interests and make it harder to vote,’ Elizabeth B. Wydra, the president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, said, referring to the Affordable Care Act. 

After a course on constitutional criminal procedure, Ms. Coney discovered a legal approach that resonated: originalism, or the practice of interpreting the Constitution according to what it meant when it was adopted. 

‘I wasn’t familiar when I entered law school with originalism as a theory,’ she said last year in a speech at Hillsdale, a Christian college in Michigan. ‘But I found myself as I read more and more cases becoming more and more convinced that the opinions that I read that took the originalist approach were right.’”

Abortion

Among other ugly things, it looks like the new radical conservative supreme court court will probably overturn the 1973 Roe abortion decision and the 2015 Obergefell same-sex marriage decision. In the case of abortion, if the court adopts Barrett’s belief that life begins at conception and abortion is murder, it could make abortion felony murder in all states. Before Barrett it seemed that conservatives wanted Roe overturned, with the decision to allow or regulate abortion left to individual states as a matter of state’s rights. 

If the new radical Christian right court goes beyond that traditional conservative position and adopts the fertilized egg and the human fetus is a human being and all abortion is murder, that would be the end of nearly all abortions in America. I do not know how plausible the abortion is murder outcome is compared to simply reversing Roe and leaving the decision to the states. Either way, a national civil right under Roe to have an abortion looks to become extinct in the next couple of years. This change in law will come despite a majority of Americans who support the Roe decision and want it to remain the law.

Same-sex marriage

It seems likely that the 2015 Obergefell decision that created a national right to same-sex marriage is also going to be reversed in the next couple of years. Reversing Obergefell would create a real mess for the people involved in the approximately 293,000 same-sex marriages since Obergefell. The rights of those people will be ripped away. How that will be handled is an open question. This too is a matter of sacred religious belief that the radical Christian right is going to force on the American people against their will.

Lies, authoritarianism, Christian Nationalism & originalism

In terms of lies and deceit, Judge Barrett is starting off with a big bang. She failed to list her affiliation with the People of Praise Christian cult. That is a lie of omission. The cult itself has removed references to her affiliation with the group, which constitutes another lie of omission. One of the things about Evangelical Christianity vs. Catholicism seems to be how the biblical Commandment to not lie is treated. Most Evangelicals in politics seem to have absolutely no moral qualm whatever about lying and deceiving the public. On the other hand, most Catholics in politics seem to have at least some moral regard for truth. Of course, that is just a personal opinion that formed over the last 20 years or so. Some searching did not turn up any published data on this point, so that is just an unsubstantiated personal opinion. 

Regarding authoritarianism, Judge Barrett appears to have the authoritarian mindset. In the name of her infallible,  sacred moral values, she probably will not hesitate to vote to overturn abortion and same-sex marriage laws that most Americans currently support. That fits with my conception of anti-democratic authoritarianism. How else can one describe willingness to engage in extreme judicial activism that a majority of Americans oppose?

The Oct. 6 discussion here on American Christian Nationalism (seems like months ago) described the Christian nationalist mindset. The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) (a group I financially support) wrote this in an article, FFRF Warns Barrett would complete Christian Nationalist takeover of Supreme Court: 

“The Freedom From Religion Foundation says that President Trump’s new presumed Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett, if confirmed, would be 

‘a disaster for the constitutional principle of separation between state and church’ and would complete the Christian Nationalist takeover of the high court for more than a generation. Both The New York Times and CNN have reported that Barrett is Trump's choice, even though Trump is not scheduled to make the announcement until Saturday afternoon. Barrett, by far the most ultra-conservative of the nominees on his short list, is the one most admired by the Religious Right. .... Barrett’s biography and writings reveal a startling, life-long allegiance to religion over the law.”

Christian Nationalists stand for mixing of the Evangelical church and state and for the dominance of white people over Catholics, atheists and racial minorities. The group Christians Against Christian Nationalism wrote this about Christian Nationalist ideology:

“Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation. We believe that:

• People of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square. 
• Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions.”  

That ideology sounds at least significantly bigoted, if not mostly racist. Obviously, Christian Nationalists will deny any bigotry or racism is a motivating factor in their belief system. Their actions contradict their denials. Also, white unease with racial demographic and social changes was by some research the single most influential factor favoring the president in the 2016 presidential election. One researcher described the phenomenon like this in a 2018 paper:

“Support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election was widely attributed to citizens who were “left behind” economically. These claims were based on the strong cross-sectional relationship between Trump support and lacking a college education. Using a representative panel from 2012 to 2016, I find that change in financial wellbeing had little impact on candidate preference. Instead, changing preferences were related to changes in the party’s positions on issues related to American global dominance and the rise of a majority–minority America: issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status.”

Given her radical Christian background, it is reasonable to believe that Judge Barrett is going to protect white Americans’ sense of dominant group status, and she is going to do that with an unflinching, self-righteous moral vengeance. 

Finally, regarding Originalism, it is an excuse that conservatives dreamed up in the 1980s as a basis to reverse the ongoing legal and social trends that they hated. Originalism holds that the interpretation of the Constitution must be interpreted based on the original understanding of the authors or the people at the time it was ratified. This idea is sheer blithering nonsense. The original constitutional authors, and Americans generally, were at each other's throats over disagreements. More or less those same disagreements are still bitterly debated today. One sees it in the urban-rural divide which existed at the time the constitution was written and ratified. 

The constitution is filled with ambiguities and bitterly fought compromises. The ambiguities were necessary as the only way to achieve agreement. Arguing in the 1980s or in 2020 that it is possible to divine intent from the people or the authors is a fantasy that only a rigid ideologue could take seriously. To be blunt about it: Originalism is a radical partisan ideologue excuse to freeze time and society and then to remake society into what conservatives what it to be right now. The historical record on the disagreements among both the Founders and the American people at the time is rock solid and undeniable. That Judge Barrett has latched onto this kind of reality-detached crackpottery is evidence of just how radical and blind she really is.  

Judge Barrett is very likely going to be a disaster of literally Biblical proportions and the American people are going to get it good and hard whether they want it or not.