Well, they’re over. The Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett were subdued, non-confrontative and — amazingly — ended with a hug between Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the leading Democrat on the judiciary committee and Sen. Lindsay O. Graham, her Republication counterpart.
Can’t get much better than that. We will see if Democrats have another post-hearings ambush planned, as was the case with Brett Kavanaugh.
As for coverage of the nominee herself, it was somewhere between treating her as an exotic zoo creature and understanding her as the complex person that she is. Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece last week that expresses my thoughts about some of this news coverage.
This week, the New York Times published an article by three cultural anthropologists (identified as reporters) who were sent to the Midwest and South to discover the origins of Judge Barrett’s religious belief.
Days earlier, another excavation team from the Washington Post produced a similar piece, called “Amy Coney Barrett served as a ‘handmaid’ in Christian group People of Praise.” By the Post’s model of journalistic insinuation, People of Praise is about two removes from the Branch Davidian cult.
It’s an on-the-mark essay if you can get to it beyond the paywall. One more piece of it:
… the Times writers make clear, repeatedly, that Judge Barrett’s religiosity is . . . well, how can one put this? Let us just say that her religiosity is conveyed as not what one would expect to find in polite company today. At least not theirs.
But that same religiosity is found among millions of Americans, who don’t find Barrett’s decision to have a large family and practice a traditional form of faith to be strange at all.
One thing journalists did reflect accurately was how many Republicans kept going on and on and on about her being a married woman with seven kids. And how she played along with it, introducing her sizeable family whenever she could.
Of course the media noticed that. To quote the New York Times:
During Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings this week, Republican senators, one after another, marveled at a role that doesn’t appear on her résumé: mother of seven. They described her mothering as “tireless” and “remarkable,” clear evidence that she was a “superstar.” Senator Josh Hawley asked her for parenting advice.
Judge Barrett has embraced the image. News cameras were there to watch her load her large family into her car before her official nomination. “While I am a judge, I’m better known back home as a room parent, car-pool driver and birthday party planner,” she said the day she was nominated.
Would her GOP backers have been as enthused if the nominee had been a single woman or a single mom?
Of course not. Did anyone really think that President Donald Trump would be stupid enough to repeat Bush II’s 2005 mistake of nominating to the Court the older and less motherly Harriet Miers, who was never married with no children? Conservatives helped sink that nomination, of course, because of emerging evidence of her support for abortion rights.
Still there wasn’t the attractive 40-something nominee, a bunch of photogenic kids nor the helpful husband to act as props in that drama. Give the Republicans some credit for learning something the last time a woman was nominated. This time around, they came up with a highly qualified mom.
As Emma Green in the Atlantic wrote:
In Republicans’ view, Barrett’s combination of domesticity and professional success is exactly what qualifies her for a seat on the Supreme Court. “Long before you had your own seven children, you were also the de facto mother to many others,” (Senator Mike) Lee said. “Those responsibilities have undoubtedly helped you throughout life, establishing leadership roles in your career as a lawyer, as a professor, and now, as a judge.”
All the public yelling and screaming about Barrett’s association with the Catholic charismatic community People of Praise ended up not affecting the hearings one whit — so far. The Democrats on the judiciary committee were more interested in the fate of the Affordable Care Act and the future of abortion rights.
As for the Republicans, they wanted a mom and they rightly guessed the rest of America did, too. As the Times adds:
For American women in public office, being a mother has become a powerful but tricky credential. A woman who is professionally successful and ambitious is often seen as threatening or off-putting, researchers have found in multiple surveys of voters, but being a mother tempers that. It makes women seem warm and relatable — and suggests they can relate to voters’ lives, too.
Which is why the efforts of some media to portray Barrett as living in the midst of a control-freak commune turned to naught. Voters don’t care about that. They do care that she’s got a family and that, with her husband, this family and its Catholic faith, is at the center of their lives.
Must say it is perplexing to see a nominee faulted for having too much religious commitment. Usually the alleged faults found with a nominee have more to do with not acting faithful, such as hitting on women as a college student or having a drinking problem (Brett Kavanaugh) or wanting to roll back civil rights gains (Robert Bork). Tangent alert: the Hill just did a piece on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden being the “father of borking” for those of you not familiar with the Reagan era.
To quote the New York Times, the best they could do is say Barrett is now the face of “a new conservatism.” That is, one that comes from the geographical center of the country and a faith-based law school (University of Notre Dame) instead of the East Coast and Ivy League schools attended by all the other members of the current high court.
Judge Barrett is from the South and Midwest. Her career has been largely spent teaching while raising seven children, including two adopted from Haiti and one with Down syndrome, and living according to her faith. She has made no secret of her beliefs on divisive social issues such as abortion. A deeply religious woman, her roots are in a populist movement of charismatic Catholicism.
From her formative years in Louisiana to her current life in Indiana, Judge Barrett has been shaped by an especially insular religious community, the People of Praise, which has about 1,650 adult members, including her parents, and draws on the ecstatic traditions of charismatic Christianity, like speaking in tongues.
One does wonder what rock they’ve been hiding under. Folks like Barrett have been around for a long time, in flyover country and even in some communities on the coasts. It’s just only now that the planets are aligning to actually give them a chance at the Supreme Court.
Also, speaking in tongues is not an “ecstatic tradition.” Wish journalists would junk that “ecstatic” descriptor, which dates back to a time in the 1960s and ‘70s when journalists thought these practitioners were in a trance. (They weren’t).
If confirmed, Barrett would become the first admitted charismatic on the court., a fact noted by First Things two weeks ago. The accepted start date for mainline and Catholic charismatic renewal is 1960 — when Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett made headlines when he was kicked out of his parish in southern California because he admitted to praying in tongues -– which means that it took six decades before one of its followers made it to the highest court. Pentecostalism is, of course, the fastest growing form of religious faith in the world, at this point in time (bookmark this collection of Pew Research Center studies).
That’s a short amount of time. It took 127 years (starting in 1789) to get a Jewish justice (1916, Louis Brandeis). Interestingly, none of the recent profiles of Barrett by the MSM have mentioned this fact. And I don’t know of any Republican official who considers the Catholic charismatic part of Barrett’s identity as an issue. What is an issue is that she fits the view that lots of Republicans have of normality, which is (1) being married and (2) having several kids.
I don’t particularly like Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan’s way of wielding her pen like a hatchet, but she picked up the same emphasis that I felt.
The opening day of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court was kid-friendly. It was child-obsessed. It was a little over five hours of children as talking points and visual aids and proof of unwavering conservative values. It’s hard to recall a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee that was so focused on the well-being, the deportment and the birth story of our youngest citizens.
Rare was the Republican on the committee who was able to deliver an opening statement without referring to the seven children in the Barrett family. This feat of parenting seemed to leave them gobsmacked with admiration and utterly mystified as to how a two-parent household with significant financial resources was capable of wrangling such a large brood without the missus showing up with oatmeal on her clothes…
The many references to Barrett’s children were a not-so-subtle pronouncement that her prolific motherhood was especially good and admirable and a sign that she was not shirking her womanly duty while she was unleashing her ambition. Barrett had it all — on terms that were acceptable to social conservatives.
OK, so yes, Barrett was the GOP’s version of the perfect woman and that is something several journalists glummed onto. Jen Pollock Michel, writing for Christianity Today, noted the almost biblical proportions of it all.
One of the first articles I read about Barrett cited the early morning hour (between 4 and 5 a.m.) at which she rises to exercise before ferrying some of her children to and from swimming practice. To see her maternal form against the dark sky, the sun cradled beneath the horizon, reads like epic poetry — or even biblical verse. As Proverbs 31 details, the virtuous woman is one who “gets up while it is still night; she provides food for her family and portions for her female servants.” As the story takes shape in our Western, modern, individualist mind, the solitary heroine rises before the house rouses.
The article goes on to remind us that Barrett gets lots of help from various relatives and babysitters, plus she’s got a supportive husband who appears to have made career decisions based on the needs of his wife and family. Also, living on two attorneys’ salaries helps as well. And also there’s that covenant community. I’m willing to bet a lot of help came from people there.
A Washington Post piece by Sarah Pulliam Bailey and Samantha Schmidt also dwells on the family angle.
(Erin) Lynch was bothered by the way the judge’s story was being used by politicians. She felt President Trump was exploiting the nomination to try to win over Catholic suburban women like her, she said. And she was frustrated that senators continued to bring up Barrett’s large family.
“You just know that if it was a father of 7 up for nomination,” Lynch texted her friend, “they wouldn’t be doing that.”
With Kavanaugh, was the topic of his wife and kids even mentioned? (Looking back, the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s large family — with nine children — did inspire quite a bit of chatter.)
As Catholic women watched the first two days of Barrett’s confirmation process in the Senate, some saw her as a new kind of “feminist icon,” a woman who raised seven children while pursuing a successful career and prioritizing her faith. Others saw an unrealistic model of what Catholic women are expected to be.
“She’s like a new-wave Virgin Mary where you can have it all. You can be a virgin and be a mom. You can be super successful in your career and be a perfect, submissive wife,” said Natalia Imperatori-Lee, a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College in New York. “It’s pedestalizing the impossible.”
Whether she’s a new-wave Virgin Mary or the face of a “new conservatism,” Barrett is a whole different fish that reporters are struggling to wrap their minds around. But they shouldn’t act surprised that President Donald Trump made the choice he did. Because — for now — that is the only kind of woman many of his core supporters will enthusiastically accept.