Elie Mystal, The Nation - You can see Barrett’s moral hypocrisy all throughout her judicial opinions. No modern church favors deliberate indifference to human life. Amy Coney Barrett does. In 2019, she dissented from a Seventh Circuit opinion that found that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment protected people in prison from correctional officers’ firing “warning shots” into a cafeteria. Barrett callously wrote:,“The guards may have acted with deliberate indifference to inmate safety by firing warning shots into the ceiling of a crowded cafeteria in the wake of the disturbance.… In the context of prison discipline, however, ‘deliberate indifference’ is not enough.”
Moreover, there’s no “Catholic” right to bear arms. If you believe the stories, Jesus famously told his followers to put down their weapons. But Barrett finds no conflict between that teaching and an expansive view of gun rights. She dissented from a 2019 case where the majority ruled that Wisconsin could disarm felons. Barrett found that “virtue-based restrictions” could not be applied to gun rights.
In 2020, again in dissent, Barrett was the lone voice in favor of the Trump administration’s policy of denying entry to immigrants who may in the future require public assistance. She alone thought it was lawful for the Trump administration to apply the “public charge” rule to deny green cards to such people. I am reminded of Jesus’s famous sermon where he says, “Thou shalt turn away any neighbor who may solicit an EBT card to pay for her bread.”
That is Barrett’s record. Her religion is not the source of that record; it is the shield she uses to blind people to the political extremism it contains.
Nobody should care that Barrett is Catholic, or “very” Catholic, or “super” Catholic. But people should absolutely care that the woman has herself said that she might and should recuse herself from cases involving one conflict between the laws and her church but hasn’t recused herself from cases involving others—and seems unlikely to once she gets to the Supreme Court.
Barrett will not recuse herself from cases involving abortion. In fact, on the Seventh Circuit, she has sought to impose herself on abortion decisions that weren’t even on her desk. In 2018, a three-judge panel she was not on invalidated an Indiana law requiring that fetal remains be buried or cremated. Barrett voted to reconsider the ruling in front of the full circuit. Her side lost, but the Supreme Court eventually reinstated the law. In 2019, another Indiana law required girls under the age of 18 to receive consent from a parent before getting an abortion, including girls who had already received a court order allowing them to have one. Again, Barrett was not on the three-judge panel which invalidated the law, but again she voted to have the case reviewed before the full circuit.
These are not the actions of a person trying to keep their personal beliefs out of an abortion debate. Quite the opposite: Barrett has been trying to get her hands on an abortion case since she got on the circuit.
What this means is that Barrett is unwilling to impose her theocratic views to save a man’s life, but she is very likely willing to take dominion over a woman’s body for nine months, forcing them to bring an unwanted pregnancy to term. She’ll put herself between a woman and her doctor but won’t stand in front of an executioner and a defenseless prisoner. That incongruity doesn’t sound like the devout position of a religious adherent; it sounds like some bullshit dreamed up by Federalist Society hypocrites more concerned with using that law to control women than with serving God.
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