Breda O'Brien
The View
Amy Coney Barrett’s life should be a role model for feminists. She has a marriage where her husband, Jesse, does more of the cooking and cleaning than she does. She manages to balance a busy household of seven children, including two adopted from Haiti, with working outside the home. She is the first mother of school-age children to be nominated to sit on the Supreme Court. Yet her ideological opponents are acting as if this is a moment which will set back the cause of women a century.
The reason? Amy Coney Barrett is a Catholic and has pro-life views. Here in Ireland, Senator Ivana Bacik, speaking on RTÉ’s Leap of Faith radio programme chaired by Michael Comyn, affirmed that Coney Barrett’s religion should not matter. Almost in the same breath, she then declared that Amy Coney Barrett should answer questions about her membership in a ‘murky organisation’ which seems to be a “Handmaid’s Tale- type organisation”.
She felt questions were warranted because Coney Barrett could have a “Handmaid’s Tale view of women and LGBT people”.
For those unfamiliar with it, Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale portrays a dystopian culture where fertile women who have committed criminal actions in the eyes of the state are forced into bearing children for the infertile. In the book, Atwood is particularly sympathetic to the handmaids who were once Catholic nuns.
Conversion
Old nuns are either killed or despatched to the colonies for hard agricultural labour in conditions of extreme pollution. Younger nuns are offered the choice either of the colonies or conversion and are frequently tortured. Catholic priests are murdered by being hanged on what is called the Wall. Christian denominations, including Quakers, Bap-tists and Catholics, are specifically named as enemies of the Sons of Jacob, the group that has created the legal, political and spiritual nightmare that is Gilead.
In short, it is the state religion that is the embodiment of evil in the novel, not Catholicism.
Margaret Atwood, in a 2017 Sojourners interview, spoke about communications from thoughtful religious people who ‘got it’ that this is a book about religious freedom.
She says that those letter-writers understood that the Sons of Jacob abolish religious freedom because they are not interested in religion: “They’re interested in power. They’re not interested in belief or in faith; they’re interested in compliance and they’re using religion as a way to get the compliance, because once you set up a state religion like that, no matter what you call it — even if you call it Maoism – anybody who doesn’t agree with you is a heretic.”
What is the problem with the Kingdom of God? The Christian vision is all about building a world of justice and mercy”
The attacks on Amy Coney Barrett are by heresy-hunters – those who believe that abortion is sacred and anyone who dissents from this must be rooted out and removed.
Senator Bacik’s other concerns include Amy Coney Barrett’s 2006 commencement address at Notre Dame Law school. Amy Coney Barrett exhorted graduates not to make their legal careers an end in and of themselves, but “a means to an end” that is part of “building the Kingdom of God”.
This, apparently, makes her unfit to be a Supreme Court Justice, unlike Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a non-observant Jew who had a framed quote from the Book of Deuteronomy just outside her office: “Justice, justice, shall you pursue.”
Speech
What is the problem with the Kingdom of God? The Christian vision is all about building a world of justice and mercy, which includes and respects everyone. In a part of the speech not quoted by Senator Bacik, Amy Coney Barrett calls on people not to be motivated by “ambition” and not to allow “satisfaction, prestige, or money” guide their career decisions.
This is absolutely basic for anyone wishing to be a Christian. If a Christian is not building the Kingdom of God, they are failing in their primary mission. Excluding Christians from public roles or activism on these grounds would have excluded everyone from Rev. Martin Luther King to Florence Nightingale, from anti-slavery advocate William Wilberforce to Catholic emancipationist, Daniel O’Connell.
Liberalism was meant to be the big tent protecting Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheist and agnostics”
It would also have excluded the person who said in 2013: “I was reminded that while our time on Earth is fleeting, he is eternal. His life, his lessons live on in our hearts and, most importantly, in our actions. When we tend to the sick, when we console those in pain, when we sacrifice for those in need, wherever and whenever we are there to give comfort and to guide and to love, then Christ is with us.”
That was Barack Obama, by the way. Liberalism was meant to be the big tent protecting Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheist and agnostics by defending their right to freedom of expression.
If an absolutely basic Christian statement about building the Kingdom of God is enough to exclude Amy Coney Barrett from the ranks of women allowed to be Supreme Court judges, liberalism has failed.