Supreme Court battle takes an ugly new twist
I was watching “Law and Order” last night, which is what I have been doing every night since the pandemic began in March. Due to the magic of cable, streaming, and old fashioned network TV, I can have those “ripped from the headlines” episodes running on a loop.
Last night’s episode was from 1999, and I was only paying casual attention because my faucet was leaking and I was tr ying to figure out how to stop the incessant drip. But then one of the characters said his Black former crack-addict client deserved to get her toddler son back from the white adoptive parents who had been raising him for the last three years, and I forgot about the leak. The phrase “ripped from the headlines” became “plus ca change,” as I pondered how fascinating it was that a controversy from two decades ago was still playing itself out in the present.
Among the other things that her opponents have questioned is the fact that Amy Coney Barrett has committed the crime of adopting two Black children. To be more specific, since details matter, she has adopted two children from Haiti. Those children have now become the focus of scrutiny as the left beings what I call the “Kavanaughzation” of the Supreme Court nominee. I also call it the “Palinization,” but we will get to that in a minute.
Exactly two years ago, Senate Democrats and their allies engaged in one of the most despicable displays of character assassination since Clarence Thomas was subject to that “high-tech lynching” almost 30 years ago. To this day there are people, including an aspiring vice president, who insist that Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a serial abuser, orgy master and privileged prep boy with the “punchable face” (oh sorry, that was Nick Sandmann. It’s hard to keep track of the hated privileged white males in the TDS era). And yet, he was confirmed because sticks and stones may break our bones, but if you have the votes, suck it up. Legal principle, you know.
It’s not hard to see the stars aligning for exactly the same type of extravaganza again, since Amy Coney Barrett, now awarded an acronym like RBG, is anathema to the left. I posted a few positive things about her on my Facebook page and when friends reposted that on their own pages, women I had no idea existed went ballistic. It was like some twisted Faberge Organics Shampoo commercial (“And I told two friends, and she told two friends, and those two friends took a stroke, and so on…”). There is no question that ACB is controversial, because she is one of the most purely and unapologetically conservative female voices in a position of authority. That alone has angered the pink hat crowd, and there is no surprise there. Hardly worth an oped.
But this has gone beyond mere disagreement with her policy positions. Critiquing her likely vote overturning Roe v. Wade and against the Affordable Care Act is absolutely appropriate and even necessary in order to fully respect the principle of advise and consent. But as we saw with Kavanaugh, it
hasn’t stopped there.
The nominee has become the target of attacks on her faith. Conservative Catholics are ready for that, because we’re familiar with the playbook. Start with the Know Nothing Chapter, read on through the Al Smith Chapter, get a yellow highlighter for the Kennedy Chapter and hum a few bars of “The dogma lives loudly in us.”
But now we get to that classic, go-after-the-mothering part of the process, and throw in a little racism. The Palinization part is expected, since we all know what the tolerant liberal females and their male cohorts did to John McCain’s running mate. Several folks who should have known better, including people affiliated with the august New York Times, suggested that Sarah Palin’s youngest son Trig was
not really her child. They winked and nodded and some even came out and accused Palin of pretending to give birth to a baby that was actually her grandson, Bristol’s firstborn.
In the annals of character assassination, it’s up there with the pubic hair on the Pepsi can, as Justice Thomas would surely agree. But it was typical of the way that the left treats conservative women. Actually, let me be blunt: It’s exactly the way the left treats women who actively oppose abortion. It is the classic, predictable and increasingly impotent methodology used to ridicule, delegitimize and neutralize pro-life females. Go after their mothering.
And now, with Amy Coney Barrett, it has come full circle. We are smack dab in the middle of the Black Lives Matter moment, so obviously race will be an is
sue no matter what is said or done. But this is racism mixed in with sexism, and that is a potent combination.
Coney Barrett and her husband adopted two young children from Haiti, a country with which I am intimately familiar having handled a number of immigration cases for Haitian nationals. One of my Haitian clients was a journalist who had written columns condemning Papa Doc Duvalier, the Haitian dictator in the 1970s. He was forced to flee. Haiti has suffered from political strife, poverty and untold natural disaster. Adopting a child, let alone two, from that sort of maelstrom is a heroic act. I am sure that the judge and her husband would say that they were the ones who were rescued, such is the profound nature of their faith, but in actual fact, they saved those children from early death.
But because the judge is white, and the children are Black, the narrative has twisted to fit the BLM narrative. There is the suggestion that Black children should only be adopted by Black parents so that they can be given full access to the richness of their heritage. This is objectionable, and to my mind, a form of segregation. The theory: Better to be an authentic orphan in poverty than a beloved child raised by people of the wrong color.
That sort of thinking sets us back decades, even centuries. I would think that the women who are wailing about the possible loss of abortion rights would understand that type of argument, given that they’ve donned their red robes and warned about the return of the Handmaid’s Gilead where they will be forced into the 1960 back alleys for their abortions.
So by this reckoning, Amy Coney Barrett hates women, is a religious zealot, and also exploits little Black children by ripping them from their roots and heritage. This is the insanity that is playing out on the left, a malady that took hold well before the election of 2016 and is becoming, with each passing day, more deadly. A conservative woman cannot be a person of faith, a loving and color blind mother, and a great jurist in the alternative universe that is claiming at least as many lives as COVID 19.
And that is a tragedy for our times.