Without any other palatable argument for ramming through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, Fox has seized on a fake narrative of religious victimhood, that objections to her are based on her faith. It will almost surely be adopted by the rest of the right-wing.
We called out this effort about two weeks ago. Media Matters has surveyed the media landscape surrounding Barrett’s nomination and, noting the outsized role that Fox News plays in right-wing messaging, crunched the numbers:
The channel’s initial coverage serves as the bellwether for the right-wing media playbook of how they want the fight to transpire over the next month. Reputable media outlets must recognize the spin for what it is -- a manufactured criticism seeking to distract from the fact that Barrett was nominated as a means to end the Affordable Care Act, Roe v. Wade, and countless other progressive accomplishments and precedents.
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A Media Matters analysis of weekday programming found that from September 21 to October 1, Fox News aired 87 segments about alleged faith attacks against Barrett, while CNN and MSNBC had only six each. Notably, the information about Barrett being the nominee didn’t leak until September 25, while the official nomination took place on September 26. But 37 of Fox’s 87 segments aired before the news leaked around 4 p.m. EDT on September 25.
I have seen some excellent pushback on this messaging on Fox. So I am hoping Democrats will be able to keep this up, especially as the supposedly deep Christians continue to fail to provide a relief package for suffering Americans in the middle of a pandemic, in favor of ramming through a Supreme Court nominee who will vote to take away their health insurance.
Underneath, you can watch Democrat Chris Hahn nicely demolish the right-wing effort to turn Barrett into a Christian martyr, via my September 25, 2020 post on Crooks and Liars.
(Barrett image via screen grab)
I am a full-blooded agnostic but the latter have my respect while the former scare the living daylights out of me.
In reality, Barrett’s confirmation is about the fervent wish of angry Right Wingers to pack the Supreme Court with a 3rd stolen seat, specifically to give themselves a 6-3 hammerlock of Far Far Right partisan idealogues at the apex of our judiciary. It’s nothing more or less than that extremist intention by the Right to fully politicize the court.
As for Barrett’s religious beliefs being persecuted, Harris pretty much demolished that canard last night in short order. And Barrett’s Catholicism isn’t a problem. The problem is that she uses it as a cloak for her obvious partisanship. If she was taking her Catholicism seriously, she would not be able to support the death penalty, she would not support the vicious treatment of immigrants by the Pence White House, she would not support the suppression of voters, and she would not support an obviously partisan move to erase the ACA. But she does support all those things, and she’s made that clear. She also supports the criminalization of women’s reproductive choices, and she supports the Hard Right’s demand that pretty much every single consequential decision of the Earl Warren Supreme Court be wiped out, including Brown v Board of Education.
After Barrett is rammed onto the Supreme Court, in a similarly craven manner as the one used to ram Kavanaugh on, we can look forward to a slew of 6-3 and 5-4 Hard Right decisions. Alito and Thomas gloated openly about this just this week, when they demanded that Obergefell be tossed out, which would retract the civil status that same sex marriages have had. That would simply be cancelled. Roe would be gutted of nearly all its effect, in that abortion would simply not be legal in much of the country, and multiple Red states are already making it a criminal act to even leave the state to have a procedure done elsewhere. If Mr. Brown were to bring his case about educational inequality to a 6-3 Supreme Court with Barrett, we can guarantee he would be told to stop whining and that if he doesn’t like his daughter being bused to a segregated school, he should vote in a new school board.
These are only some of the consequences of having 6 Hard Right justices on the high court at one time. We’ll frankly be looking at a court that may actually go farther than Roger Taney’s did in attacking the rights of most people in the country.