Actress Patricia Heaton has warned Christians to brace themselves for an “onslaught” of media hate over the next few weeks as President Trump and the Republicans push a Supreme Court nomination to fill the late-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat.
In a tweet on Sunday, Heaton, while not specifically mentioning the SCOTUS battle ahead, warned Christians, especially Catholics, to be prepared for a high-level of religious ignorance.
“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.
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.
— Patricia Heaton (@PatriciaHeaton) September 21, 2020
Heaton has been a stalwart pro-life advocate. In February, she denounced the Democratic Party for hosting a “barbaric” platform.
“I don’t understand why pro-life people want to know if they are ‘welcome’ to join the democrat party,” said Heaton. “Why would any civilized person want to support a barbaric platform that champions abortion for any reason through all nine months funded by taxpayers?”
“P.S. I didn’t vote in the last presidential cycle and will not be voting in this one. I am not a Trump supporter,” she added.
Though Heaton did not mention her by name in her Sunday tweet, the media and the Democrats have already been portraying Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s frontrunner to replace Ginsburg, as a psycho religious extremist who helped inspire Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Writing at NBC News, feminist Jill Filipovic stressed that Barrett would be the “ultimate insult to RBG”:
Instead of doing what Ginsburg did — pushing doors open, reaching out to help others through — Barrett tried to slam them shut. She went on to be a conservative lawyer, professor and judge, and if she is appointed to the Supreme Court, she will likely be key in undermining much of what has allowed American women to make the progress they have: abortion rights, contraception access and prohibitions on many forms of gender discrimination.
This certainly puts Barrett at odds with most of America’s most venerated female lawyers and jurists and with female lawyers more generally. Feminism creates something like a virtuous cycle: As women gain greater opportunity, they become more invested in preserving and expanding what they’ve gained.
Likewise, Newsweek tried (and failed) to claim that Barrett’s charismatic Catholic group “People of Praise” inspired Margaret Atwood’s “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.