Democrats aren't antiCatholic bigots for questioning Amy Coney Barrett
The latest Republican talking point: that Democrats are anti-Catholic bigots for opposing Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the US supreme court. Liberals have raised questions about Barrett’s membership in a conservative organization that dictates traditional gender roles (men as leaders, women as their helpmeets), and her many conservative rulings which seem to suggest that she brings her conservative religiosity onto the bench when deciding matters of law. The Republican party has cannily repackaged that as religious bigotry.
Barrett’s faith isn’t the issue. Her conservative, anti-equality views are.
It’s hard to make the case that liberals are hostile to Catholics when the Democratic nominee for the presidency is himself a Catholic, and when more current US supreme court justices are Catholic than are adherents to any other faith. It’s also hard to argue that Barrett’s conservative views are required by her faith, and therefore opposing them is tantamount to religious discrimination.
Catholics, like people of every faith in the world, pick and choose which tenets of the faith to adhere to; the faith itself also shifts and changes (for example: abortion, now an animating issue for many church leaders, has not been a top priority for the church for most of its history, nor considered murder). This is one reason why Catholic Americans are just as likely as Americans generally to use contraception and have abortions, even though both are formally prohibited by the faith. It’s why a great many Catholic women do not in fact submit to their husbands. It’s why some Catholics identify as LGBT, and are not chaste as the church demands. It’s why the overwhelming majority of Catholics have sex before marriage.
Questioning Barrett’s views – which, yes, may be influenced by her Catholic faith – is not akin to opposing Catholicism or religious faith, or persecuting her for her religion. It’s about opposing a reactionary brand of conservatism that seeks to undermine important progress toward women’s rights, LGBT rights, and racial equality.
It’s easy to argue that we should separate Amy Coney Barrett’s personal religious views from her professional work. But she doesn’t do that, and the Catholic Church demands that its own members carry their faith outside of church and often into their work. Many Catholic bishops, for example, refuse to give communion to Catholic politicians if those politicians are pro-choice. That’s not a position that happens only on the fringes; it’s exactly what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger demanded before he became pope.
Many Catholic politicians do in fact separate their religious faith from their political duties – which is why they’re denied communion. But the folks who cry foul when liberals question the extreme conservative religious beliefs of a US supreme court nominee are the same ones who see no problem with religious entities interfering in secular life – with Catholic hospitals refusing to give rape victims emergency contraception, with the religious boss of a secular craft store refusing to offer
his employees a health care policy that covers the most effective forms of contraception because he believes some forms of birth control are sinful.
Liberals generally want a robust separation of church and state, where people are free to practice their own religions without interference or discrimination, but are not free to impose their religion on anyone else, or use their religious views as a pretext to violate the law or harm others. Many conservatives insist that the United States is a Christian country (or, in the more updated jargon, a “Judeo-Christian” country), that Christianity should in fact dictate political and legal decisions, and that religious freedom means the freedom to discriminate and violate generally applicable laws as long as you have a religious justification.
Amy Coney Barrett has made clear that she believes abortion is morally wrong. When she has ruled on abortion-related cases, she has ruled to restrict abortion access. She has made clear that she does not adhere to a basic ethos of gender equality, that men and women should have equal rights, opportunities, authority, and power; she instead is a voluntarily member of an organization that formally opposes gender equality, and has signaled her view that men and women are “complementary” – men in charge as leaders, women submitting to their authority.
It’s entirely reasonable for people who are concerned about gender equality to ask how that view would shape Barrett’s jurisprudence, much the same way we know that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s commitment to gender equality shaped her time on the court. What will Barrett’s apparent view that women have particular gender-defined roles ( being maternal, having and raising children, submitting to their husbands) mean for, say, a pregnancy discrimination case? Or a gender discrimination case more generally? Can gender discrimination as a concept even exist if the starting view is that men and women are fundamentally different and should occupy fundamentally different roles?
These are real questions raised not by Barrett’s Catholic faith generally, but by her statements, associations, and actions specifically. And Democrats should be asking them.