You can’t make this stuff up, or at least you don’t have to, as Margaret Atwood proved in the fiction The Handmaid’s Tale, in which everything she wrote about had already happened in the real world somewhere, at some time.
But yes, Republican Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett belonged to a neo-Puritan cult of Catholics called the People of Praise, in which she was officially designated a Handmaiden, the highest category of member to which a woman could aspire, for part of the cult’s ideology was female subservience. The computer-generated photo with the hood inevitably followed.
Among the lesser hypocrisies Republicans are wearing like billboards for mendacity is piously defaming any questions on Barrett’s beliefs as attacks on Christianity or violations of the constitutional religious test, as if they haven’t made careers out of doing all of that and worse themselves, and especially as if these “religious” beliefs don’t have vast social and personal implication in a nation that isn’t officially ruled by prelates.
Giving them cover is the likes of Miami archbishop Thomas Wenski, who manages to defend Barrett as a handmaiden while condemning Atwood. “That a novelist would ‘culturally appropriate’ this word to use in a distorted way to promote an ideology hostile to the Judeo-Christian patrimony of Western civilization only points to the growing biblical illiteracy of our elites and is indeed very disappointing,” he said.
Wenski’s scholarly defense of the patrimony is obviously biased on its face, even if his earlier foray into politics hadn’t been loudly condemning Notre Dame for inviting President Obama as a commencement speaker because of his policies on abortion. Those policies are actually more in line with the behavior of Catholics than with the rigidity and zealotry that has characterized especially the officials of the Catholic Church in recent decades, particularly in America. The Church also officially outlaws birth control, yet most Catholics have piously ignored that stricture for years.
But the good news is that Wenski and his ilk may no longer be ascendant. Whatever the long term trends and factors, the shift is happening visibly thanks to the corrupt and immoral regime of Trump.
Daily events pummel and absorb us, and so not many are noticing what an extraordinary realignment in American politics may be taking place. The number of veteran Republicans who not only are abandoning Trump but personally endorsing the Democratic candidate is the most obvious example. But there are others, including the movement of religious leaders away from Trump and to Biden.
Last week the Hill reported:
More than 1,600 faith leaders have endorsed Democratic nominee Joe Biden for president as of Friday, including some who could influence evangelical votes, according to a faith voters outreach group. Vote Common Good, which compiled the endorsements this week, says it is the largest group of clergy to endorse a Democratic candidate for president in modern history.
The group of endorsements includes prominent evangelical leader Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Jerushah Duford. According to its Executive Director Pastor Doug Pagitt.: “Four years ago, many religious voters decided to look the other way and give Trump a chance, but after witnessing his cruelty and corruption, a growing number of them are turning away from the president."
A similar story in the Guardian:
In July the Public Religion Research Institute found a seven-point drop in white Christian support for Trump, and a Fox News survey in August showed 28% of white evangelicals backed Biden, compared with 16% who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The crucial change is the abandonment of the one issue litmus test of abortion. Since probably the 1980s, the “pro-life” hysteria whipped up by zealots completely overcame all other moral and political considerations.
Now there’s a little room for nuance and complexity, and for a more balanced evaluation. A group called Pro-life Evangelicals for Biden said that, despite disagreeing with the Democratic candidate’s stance on abortion, “we believe that on balance, Joe Biden’s policies are more consistent with the biblically shaped ethic of life than those of Donald Trump. Therefore … we urge evangelicals to elect Joe Biden as president.”
I emphasize that a statement like that has been unthinkable for the past four decades. From a Catholic it might be called heretical.
Some of the change is being driven by younger Christians, who see the climate crisis in particular as an overriding moral issue. The recognition that there are other issues with a moral dimension—poverty, racial justice, climate and the environment—and that these may also be “pro-life” in the deeper sense, represents a return to moral rather than ideological evaluations.
This election is focusing a lot of attention as well by those who are usually quiet. Like the scientists and scientific journals that don’t normally endorse, the enormity of Trump’s ongoing immorality is forcing commitments from some working in a different sphere who prefer to stay above, or at least apart from the fray. In endorsing Biden, Belinda Bauman, the author of Brave Souls: Experiencing the Audacious Power of Empathy, said: “In all my years I’ve never publicly endorsed a candidate. But this year is different – very different. This year we don’t just face a political choice, we face a moral one.”
All of this is reflected in voters as well as religious leaders. In terms of numbers, the big movement is not among Protestant Evangelicals (still mostly identifying as Trump supporters)—it’s Catholics.
An EWTN News-RealClear Opinion poll last month found that Biden holds a 12-point lead over Trump among likely voters who identify as Catholic. In 2016 Trump won Catholics overall by 7%, with a 23 pt. margin among white Catholics. Now Biden's deficit with white Catholics is down to 7 points. (It helps, of course, that Biden is himself Catholic.)
In 5 swing states surveyed by Vote Common Good, Biden is getting 16% swing over 2016, which means that he is winning the Catholic vote in these states, where Trump won the Catholic vote in 2016 by 14 points. Biden narrows his losses among Evangelicals with a 7% swing from 2016.
So at the moment an archconservative handmaiden is about to join the real American college of cardinals (the six Catholics of nine Justices on the Supreme Court) to issue her infallible edicts potentially increasing suffering of human souls to satisfy her rigid ideology, it is a posture rapidly being abandoned within her Church.
And if anyone's knee is tempted to jerk into "anti-Catholic prejudice" position, believe me, after twelve years in Catholic schools etc., I know prejudice against Catholics when I see it. This ain't it.
One More Thing...
Barrett's parade of non answers in her first day of testimony, so similar even in language that they resembled the hoodlums endlessly repeating I decline to answer on the grounds that what I say may tend to incriminate me to congressional hearings of yore, not only pleaded ignorance of the federal law she supposedly will apply, but demonstrated a bias towards legal technicalities over the impact of decision on real people, even when they number in the millions. But that's not what the Supreme Court is about, or at least it wasn't.
In fact, considering the real world impact of decisions was so integral that those appointed to the Court often had real world political experience, It's only recently that Justices were chosen exclusively from the higher ranks of judges, almost always federal judges. But Justices who had not been judges, or had experience beyond the bench, include some of the most distinguished. Justice Earl Warren was the Governor of California. Louis Brandeis was a socially conscious crusading lawyer. William O. Douglas served as chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Felix Frankfurter helped form the American Civil Liberties Union. Stephen Breyer had federal administrative experience before joining the federal Court of Appeals.
These judges would never ignore the consequences of vanishing the US system of healthcare over a narrow interpretation of language. But apparently the idea of considering the lives of millions of men, women and children has never even occurred to Barrett.
If she is confirmed it will be a political travesty, thanks to Mitch McConnell's unilateral undermining of the Constitutional intent. While appointments and confirmations have always had a political component, McConnell turned it into a nakedly partisan exercise in 2016 by blocking even a hearing for President Obama's constitutionally mandated appointment, and then transformed the process into a literal partisan one in 2017 by changing the rules so that a Supreme Court Justice is confirmed by a simple majority vote. For generations it had required two-thirds of the Senate, until 1975, when it was changed to require a vote of three-fifths of the Senate. Views of the minority--of all minorities--had to be taken seriously then. That's how the great Justices were confirmed. That's how the Court became a respected as well as powerful institution. But not anymore.
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