Column: The Democrats' book of revelations on Judge Amy Coney Barrett
Why is the left reacting to President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court as if it is the apocalypse?
Because for them it is apocalyptic, yet not for the reasons many hysterics in politics and media insist. With the shameless and demeaning attacks on Barrett, what we’re seeing is a revelation of what the left is all about.
“I love the United States,” Barrett said when nominated by the president. “And I love the United States Constitution.”
To some, these are truly subversive statements.
Barrett is a brilliant woman who graduated top of her class at Notre Dame Law School and clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. She’s an accomplished academic, a favorite professor of many at Notre Dame.
She is Roman Catholic, the mother of seven children, including two who were adopted from Haiti. She is as much a product of her faith as the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the product of hers.
Yet faith is now treated as a political sin and some media reports suggest, erroneously, that a Christian group she belongs to was the inspiration for “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The spin is that Barrett is a submissive member of a cult with little or no mind of her own.
This is laughable to those who know her, or have read her opinions, or watched her in interviews.
But it is revealing.
Just hours after her nomination, author and Boston University professor Ibram Kendi, a favorite intellectual of left-leaning progressives, went on the attack. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at the university recently received a $10 million grant from Twitter founder and woke capitalist Jack Dorsey.
“Some white colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children,” Kendi tweeted. “They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of white people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.”
So far, I don’t think Dorsey or Twitter put Kendi in social media jail for his disgusting racist remarks. And national media personalities aren’t demanding Democrats condemn Kendi. They wouldn’t dare. Kendi has built for them the horse they ride in 2020. Kendi later accused opponents and “bots” of taking his tweet out of context. But it seems plain enough to me.
Given what Senate Democrats attempted to do to her when she was appointed and eventually confirmed to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, should we be surprised?
Or have you forgotten California Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein expressing her fear that “the dogma lives loudly within you,” or Illinois Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin wondering if Barrett was an “Orthodox Christian,” as if that’s a terrifying prospect.
“If you’re asking whether I take my faith seriously and I’m a faithful Catholic, I am,” said Barrett to the Democratic inquisitors. “Although I would stress that my personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge.”
That was once a common understanding in this country, that judges would not impose theology on the Constitution. But this was in the days before Judeo-Christianity was replaced in the Democratic pantheon by the dogma that lives loudly within them:
The left puts its faith in government now, and in activist judges, to legislate from the bench, writing laws their progressive allies in Congress couldn’t otherwise pass.
Barrett is no activist. She is a constitutional textualist. She doesn’t bend the Constitution to fit the political demands of the moment. Democrats are in hysterics, arguing that her appointment means an end to legal abortion and Roe v. Wade. But even the late Justice Ginsburg — along with other reasonable liberals — recognized that Roe was poorly reasoned, spawning decades of shrieking on all sides.
Still, in 2013, Barrett said it was “very unlikely” that the court would reverse itself: “The fundamental element, that the woman has a right to choose abortion, will probably stand.”
As an Orthodox Christian myself, I took offense at the comments of Feinstein and Durbin to Barrett, and I skewered them for it.
Although I now get the feeling that, with an election coming up, Durbin will present himself as a moderate during Barrett’s confirmation hearings in October.
Barrett’s appointment is indeed apocalyptic. The conservative writer Rod Dreher, also an Orthodox (sorry senators), has touched on this because in the Orthodox Christian understanding of the word, the apocalypse means that which is revealed or disclosed.
Mary Hallan FioRito, a local lawyer, writer and Roman Catholic who supports Barrett, is properly infuriated by the double standard against Barrett.
“Probably the comment I saw most often questioned how Judge Barrett could possibly care for her seven children and simultaneously serve on the Supreme Court,” she told me in an email. “Justice Scalia had nine children and not one ever asked him! It’s a totally sexist argument, one that Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have rejected out of hand, and in fact, condemned. If Amy Coney Barrett was a Democrat on the left, they would be falling all over themselves to call her a ‘wonder woman, role model, hero mom who manages to do it all.’
“But because she’s conservative, she’s (criticized as) a monster who uses her Haitian and Down syndrome children as props for her own ambitions,” FioRito said.
Truly this is the left’s apocalyptic moment.
Because they truly reveal themselves.
Listen to “The Chicago Way” podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — at www.wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.
Twitter @John_Kass
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