Lots of exciting work on the latest script—for which I’m truly thankful—and an insane year in general has meant blog posts are few and far between. All good—they’ve never been anything else. Here’s a quick, unpolished Q and A prompted by an old friend reaching out. She posted a funny meme lamenting the impact of Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice. It was met, almost immediately, with a question of flimsy logic:
Q: “Why is [Amy Coney Barrett], [a woman] who has been incredibly successful and had a family, literally what feminists have been fighting for, not celebrated?”
A: Oh you sweet summer child.
It’s because her viewpoints are regressive, and arguably against the progress that feminists have fought for. Her legal opinions and remarks on reproductive rights—an area that fundamentally affects women more than it affects men—have clearly and consistently been along the lines of curtailing those rights. The same could be said for her positions and legal reasoning on marriage equality.
To be clear, she’s unquestionably intelligent, but the line of legal reasoning that she subscribes to is originalism, which is a belief that judges should interpret the words of the Constitution as the original authors intended when they were written, and not take into account any degree of social progress (such as progress on women’s rights, civil rights, etc). In practice, as with her predecessor Scalia (for whom she clerked), this has been used primarily as an intellectual means of deciding cases along the most conservative lines, and when faced with the real impact of those decisions, simply saying that the legislature should clean up the mess. Most serious legal scholars don’t agree with the outcome there. For example, when the constitution was written, women couldn’t vote, and black slaves were considered to be 3/5ths of a person for the purposes of representation in that same legislature. Clearly we don’t conduct our society that way any more, and even the founders knew that social progress should be a natural part of the system. So it’s a bit ridiculous to decide cases that way—it makes one think that it’s the outcome she’s after, rather than the strength of the reasoning itself. And as those outcomes are anti-feminist on a regular basis, we aren’t big fans of her. Feminism is allowed complexity; it doesn’t just mean “women in high positions.”
There is a lot more to say on this; schools of thought on legal reasoning, the impact of her nomination and the tactics used to create the current makeup of the court, and what progressives should do to minimize the impact of Senate confirmation of a Justice against the will of the majority of Americans are all topics worth deeper dives.
For now, I’ll end with my hope: that this is the last grasping talon of a dying regime rooted in discriminatory thought, and that next week, both the executive and legislative branches will better reflect the promise of America and the thought process—based on tolerance—of the majority of its people.