Now that Judge Amy Coney Barrett has catapulted to the top of President Trump’s list to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, leftists have been attacking her Catholic faith relentlessly, characterizing her as a religious zealot out to turn every woman into a handmaid for the greater good of the white male patriarchy.
At least one Democratic Senator is saying that’s a bridge too far.
Speaking with “Fox & Friends,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said that his more extreme colleagues need to lay off the anti-Catholic bigotry. He did add, however, that he does not wish to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat until after the November election.
“I’m Catholic, OK. And religion should not enter into it. It sure doesn’t with me,” said Manchin.
Manchin extolled the freedom of religion that guarantees every American the right to practice.
“The freedom of religion is one of the basic rights we all have as an American citizen,” he said. “Whether you’re Catholic, whether you’re Protestant, whether you’re Jewish, evangelical, whatever it may be, God bless you. You worship who you want and you worship how you want. You worship the same God. All of us do.”
“It’s awful to bring in religion. It truly is,” he added.
Manchin recalled the anti-Catholic attacks that President John F. Kennedy endured during his initial campaign — accusations about how the Pope would run America, among other smears
“Everyone said … the pope’s going to run the country and I looked at my mom and said, ‘Mom, they don’t know the Catholics we know,'” he recalled.
Barrett became a household name among conservatives in 2017 when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) famously scolded her during a confirmation hearing for being a devout Catholic. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein sneered. Now, in 2020, as Barrett stands poised, potentially, to take the Supreme Court nomination, those same attacks have returned with a vengeance. Newsweek, perhaps, took the most egregious approach in an op-ed that argued, falsely, that Barrett’s charismatic Catholic group “People of Praise” inspired Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
“Members of People of Praise are assigned to personal advisers of the same sex—called a ‘head’ for men and ‘handmaid’ for women, until the rise in popularity of Atwood’s novel and the television series based on it forced a change in the latter,” the outlet reported. “Atwood herself has indicated that the group’s existence motivated her to write The Handmaid’s Tale, set in the fictional Gilead, where women’s bodies are governed and treated as the property of the state under a theocratic regime.”
Newsweek later issued a correction to the story, noting that People of Praise did not inspire Atwood’s novel and that no evidence exists to suggest that.
Actress Patricia Heaton warned fellow Catholics on Sunday to be prepared for an onslaught of hate and ignorance over the next few weeks.
“Friends, be prepared for social media to be filled with an onslaught of arrogant pronouncements based on breathtaking ignorance of religion in general, Christianity specifically and Catholicism in particularly by people who wouldn’t recognize God if He bit them on the bum,” she tweeted.