James Antle of the Washington Examiner ponders the political left’s response to Republican nominations from groups often labeled as marginalized.
Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s first Capitol Hill meetings were friendly encounters with Republican senators, but running the Supreme Court nomination gauntlet is bound to get tougher: Conservative women and minorities have aroused some of the most furious Democratic opposition.
“We want to pray for her family, as we know these will be interesting, tough weeks,” said Mercedes Schlapp, a senior adviser to President Trump’s reelection campaign, in a Catholics for Trump conference call. “I’ve gotta tell you, I’m really, really, really concerned,” added Trump deputy campaign manager Justin Clark.
Barrett’s gender and religion have already figured in some negative coverage of her nomination. An Associated Press report described the 48-year-old as having “close ties to a charismatic Christian religious group that holds men are divinely ordained as the ‘head’ of the family and faith,” quoting ex-members as saying it promotes the subjugation of women. Resistance Twitter has been more pointed in its characterization of Barrett’s beliefs.
Emily Peck wrote in the Huffington Post that Barrett’s individual success as a working mother does not make her a champion of women’s rights. “There is nothing in Barrett’s history that would indicate that she’s spent any time empowering women,” Peck argued. “Barrett’s mentor was Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court justice who consistently ruled against gender equality. As an academic, Barrett is not known for writing or studying feminist issues. She is known for being pro-life.”
Ibram X. Kendi, author of the much-consulted New York Times bestseller How To Be An Antiracist, tweeted that Barrett’s black children were not evidence against racism. “Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children,” he wrote. “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.”
