Who is Amy Coney Barrett and what is her connection to the People of Praise Movement?

Amy Coney Barrett is Donald Trump’s Supreme Court Justice nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and she (Amy, not Ruth) has been a member of the People of Praise Movement.

What is the People of Praise Movement?

According to their website, The People of Praise is a “charismatic Christian community renewal movement” which began in the 1960s when Notre Dame students and faculty “began to experience a renewal of Christian enthusiasm and fervor, together with charismatic gifts such as speaking in tongues and physical healing, as described in the New Testament book of Acts.”

Did you just say “speaking in tongues”?

Yes, I did. But I can’t make fun of it, because that’s just the kind of coastal elitism that forced people to vote for a pussy-grabbing-reality-TV-star-con-man from New York City.

OK. Tell me more about this People of Praise Movement.

They believe in women’s submissive role. They used to call women “handmaids.” This led to a hilarious misunderstanding whereby some people thought the People of Praise Movement inspired Margaraet Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale about women being forced into sexual slavery by fundamentalist Christians — you know, just like the ones who choose our SCOTUS judges now. But according to Atwood, a different covenant organization called the People of Hope — who also called women “handmaids” — served as the inspiration. Anyway, People of Praise don’t call women handmaids now, possibly because Hulu aired a television series based on the novel which became super popular.

Wait. Should Amy Coney Barrett’s religious beliefs be a consideration in whether or not she should be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice?

No, of course not. Because politics and religion should be kept separate, shouldn’t they? Separation of church and state is something that is actually good about the United States. You might even say that the separation of church and state is something that Makes America Great. Religious beliefs shouldn’t be a consideration when it comes to getting a job, whether it be as an accountant or a Supreme Court Justice or an eccentric owner of an Oklahoma exotic animal zoo. And if a person believes, for example, that abortion is wrong or that LGBTQ people are an abomination, they should absolutely separate those beliefs from their job, ESPECIALLY when it’s a job that gives them power over other people such as a judge, shouldn’t they? But that’s not what people like Amy Coney Barrett and the hundreds of federal judges appointed by Donald Trump do. In fact, the main reason these judges were chosen is because of their inability to separate their religious beliefs from their job. The main reason Republicans have stood by this corrupt criminal is because of these judges, some of whom are genuinely unqualified.

But should…

Wait, I’m not finished. Amy Coney Barrett shouldn’t be rejected as a Supreme Court Justice because of her wackadoodle religious beliefs — because really, who among us don’t believe that Joseph Smith found a stone that told him to have forty wives or that rape victims should be forced to marry their rapists or that wives should be submissive to their husbands? It’s all pretty dubious and curiously all rooted in the desire to control women’s sexuality and persecute gay people, isn’t it? Which is why religion should never dictate modern laws.

Why is this happening?

Because Donald Trump and the Republicans are determined to force fundamentalist religious beliefs onto the rest of the country. They’re committed to banning abortion and rolling back LGBTQ rights because of their religious beliefs  —  I mean, Donald has no religious beliefs because he’s a soulless vessel of venality but that’s not the point. Imposing religious beliefs on others is called Religious Fundamentalism. If you try to ban abortion and force women to give birth against their will and try to erase legal protections for the LGBTQ community because your religion says that life begins at conception and that gay people are an abomination, that’s called Oppression. If you rant and scream about the Taliban and ISIS and Iran while trying to force your own religious beliefs onto other people, that’s called Hypocrisy. If you’re a Republican trying to ban abortion while telling your mistress to get an abortion, that’s called Moral Rot.

So no, just getting back to your last question, no one should discriminate against Amy Coney Barrett because of her religious beliefs, but all decent people should have resisted Donald Trump’s appointments of hundreds of anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice federal judges and should also resist the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, but Republicans didn’t and they won’t. And lots of Trump voters probably know it’s messed up that they voted for this noxious dipturd, so they had to conjure up a fiction of a vast pedophile ring to justify it instead of facing the sad truth of this disgraceful period of American history.

What do we do know?

This.