Weaponizing femininity

One of the most distasteful elements of the U.S. Republican Party’s mad scramble to squeeze in a new Supreme Court justice before election day is the little glass dish of women lawyers and judges it is offering up like toothpicked olives, or better, mixed nuts.

We don’t yet know Donald Trump’s pick. There’s Barbara Lagoa — “I’ve heard incredible things about her,” Trump says — recently appointed judge Allison Jones Rushing, Amy Coney Barrett and others.

It is the weaponizing of femininity to crush women. It is misogynist to the most cynical degree in a party that has made cynicism its central pillar — no to considering Obama court nominee Merrick Garland, but yes to replacing the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg — and I hope we never see it so savagely practised in Canada.

When male judges are mentioned, American reporters provide a brisk list of professional qualifications. With the women, readers are told how many children she has birthed.

The always retrograde New York Times writes: “Judge Barrett and her husband, Jesse Barrett, a former federal prosecutor who is now in private practice, have seven children, all under 20, including two adopted from Haiti and a young son with Down syndrome, whom she would carry downstairs by piggyback in the morning.”

You can see the boxes Republicans tick: nice woman named Amy; genuine birth-giving woman; generous woman willing to adopt; non-racist white woman selecting Haitian children; brave woman who did not test for disability; moral woman still married to the children’s father; good woman piggybacking adorable child before work.

All this may all be accurate. But it is irrelevant. Barrett would be very junior in experience on the court, and she belongs to something that appears to be a tiny oath-swearing Christian cult called People of Praise. It involves male “heads” and female “handmaids.” Her father and her husband’s father both served, the NYT reports.

(I’m a bit worried about the “heads,” vaguely reminiscent of the “head of household” in a popular “Christian Domestic Discipline” trend that I suggest you not Google.)

For all her alleged “brilliance,” Barrett has not said or done anything that sounds remarkable. Brilliance is an adjective often thrown at nominees just as “devout” is for “Catholics.” It’s meaningless, as ubiquitous as “problematic.” My blueberry crumble is brilliant, but I’m not putting it in charge of anything.

Barrett is a weapon. She is anti-abortion and, strangely, wishes to prevent other women from making choices about their own bodies and lives. At a moment when the pandemic has sent female employment crashing down to levels not seen for decades, when women working from home have little child care, or respite from violent men they live with, when they have less ability to raise a wanted child than even in 2019, the dream might be over. A woman’s right to decide would be finished off by Ginsburg’s replacement.

Barrett is acceptable to Republicans because she is a woman who deplores the rights of women. There are a lot of them about. You see them in courtrooms, female lawyers hired by men accused of sexual assault who find it useful to hide behind their skirts, conservative women who campaign against gun control, women who vote for Trump because he doesn’t like them and they don’t like themselves.

Hard-right Republicans have been hard at work since the Reagan years taking control of the nation — a vast right-wing conspiracy, yes, but a remarkably successful one — and this Supreme Court seat is their grail. The word they use is “originalism,” interpreting the law as America’s founders would have intended in the 1788 constitution, which doesn’t mention abortion or privacy, or even the internet. They call it “purist,” a code word for returning to a primitive era when sperm were sacred and women often as not died in childbirth. Republicans understand that it looks bad when men crush women’s rights. But it’s not sexist when a woman does it, correct?

Here’s what American women have to understand. Women’s rights to equality, work, privacy, dignity are in the balance. Republicans are in for the win. Awww, Amy, and all the Republican Amys. They sound so sweet, so harmless.

Heather Mallick covers current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick