Prominent news outlets are bashing Judge Amy Coney Barrett for her faith and conservative political views as President Donald Trump considers her for a position on the U.S. Supreme Court.
A devout Catholic who serves on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett is believed to be the president’s top choice to fill the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat.
But her faith and her pro-life statements already are drawing massive criticism from the left. This week, The New York Times linked her to the pro-abortion dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood in which women are enslaved and forced to have children for the elite members of society.
Allegedly, Atwood based her popular novel on a charismatic Christian group called People of Praise, of which Barrett and her husband are members, Salon reports.
Nothing like Atwood’s dystopia in reality, People of Praise encourages Christians to “discern and act in the Lord,” Craig Lent, one of the group’s leaders, told the New York Times.
The newspaper described the Christian group as “obscure,” but Lent said they are not “nefarious or controversial,” and they “don’t try to control people. And there’s never any guarantee that the leader is always right. You have to discern and act in the Lord.”
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The Christian group asks members to enter a covenant of loyalty with one another. They “are assigned and are accountable to a personal adviser, called a ‘head’ for men and a ‘handmaid’ for women. The group teaches that husbands are the heads of their wives and should take authority over the family,” according to the newspaper.
Together, People of Praise members encourage and advise each other about life, including dating, marriage, careers and children – normal areas of life to discuss and seek advice about, though leftists are trying to portray it as dubious.
UPDATE: Since publication of this article, several news outlets have issued corrections about Atwood’s novel and People of Praise. According to Newsweek, Atwood never mentioned the Christian group in relation to her novel.
Correction: This article’s headline originally stated that People of Praise inspired ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. The book’s author, Margaret Atwood, has never specifically mentioned the group as being the inspiration for her work. A New Yorker profile of the author from 2017 mentions a newspaper clipping as part of her research for the book of a different charismatic Catholic group, People of Hope. Newsweek regrets the error.
Barrett, who has seven children including two who are adopted and one with special needs, also faced attacks on her faith during her U.S. Senate confirmation hearing for the Seventh Circuit.
As Salon reports:
Democrats also raised concerns about Barrett’s strict Catholicism. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., angered some conservatives when she pressed Barrett on her religious beliefs during her 2017 confirmation.
“You have a long history of believing that your religious beliefs should prevail,” Feinstein said at the time. “The dogma lives loudly within you.”
“It’s never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions — whether they arise from faith or anywhere else — on the law.” Barrett responded.
But it is not really her faith (Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also claim to be devout Catholics) but the living out of it that has abortion activists worried.
“Amy Coney Barrett meets Donald Trump’s two main litmus tests,” Nan Aron, president of pro-abortion group Alliance for Justice, told The New York Times. “She has made clear she would invalidate the [Affordable Care Act] and take health care away from millions of people and undermine a woman’s reproductive freedom.”
The Catholic Church strongly condemns abortion and teaches people to respect and value every human life from conception to natural death. Barrett appears to believe that is true.
Though her judicial rulings on abortion are few, she has made several statements about the value of babies in the womb. According to the Law and Crime blog, Barrett signed a public letter in 2015 that emphasized “the value of human life from conception to natural death.” In an interview with Notre Dame Magazine, she also stated that “life begins at conception.”
Barrett is a former clerk of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a strong conservative who died unexpectedly in 2016. Like Scalia, Barrett describes herself as an “originalist” judge.
Trump plans to announce his choice to replace Ginsburg at the end of the week. Trump said he plans to pick a woman to fill the seat.
