Amy Coney Barrett specializes in looking normal, okay? In fact, she’s rather attractive and that has certainly helped her cause in getting through a world in which her legal views are about as whacked and insane as any nominee since Bork, and maybe transcending him.

We couldn’t care less about her religious affiliation, which is a weird one, but we’re not even going there because we consider a person’s religion irrelevant. It is when a person’s moral views become public and associated with public policy that we start to worry and this country damned well ought to be worried about Amy Coney Barrett because, no matter how she looks, she’s not normal.

She is brilliant.

Which makes her testimony in 2017 to Al Franken about her involvement with a group called the Alliance Defending Freedom that much more problematic. The “ADF” is all about protecting freedom. It is about protecting the freedom of highly, highly, toxic, and self-righteous religious people to impose their views upon others. Specifically, like many of these groups, the ADF is particularly obsessed with sex, sex of the type of which they don’t approve, which seems like damned near everything not involving a man and a woman.

The Daily Beast brings us the story about how Al Franken questioned Barrett on her association with the ADF in 2017, which she passed off as primarily giving a talk to the group (as a law professor) and how she gives lots of talks and doesn’t know much about their beliefs. There is almost no way to interpret her testimony as anything but a straight-up lie. Not only does she know exactly what the ADF stands for, she’s been actively involved in promoting its legal theory and moving certain legal students and scholars through its programs, which aim to shut down society’s more open sexual tolerance through “freedom of religion” – which, again, is limited only to their religion.

As the Daily Beast reports the Southern Poverty Law Center has declared the ADF to be an LGTBQ hate group. This is the description of the ADF:

In the United States, their advocacy has called for the recriminalization of homosexuality and the reinstatement of legalized workplace discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgender workers. Abroad, ADF unsuccessfully defended a French law that required chemical sterilization of transgender Europeans seeking to have their gender legally recognized.

True, it was only abroad that they called for the sterilization of transgender Euros wanting legal recognition but this group functions internationally. If they haven’t advocated it in the U.S. it is probably only to avoid the horrid press it would receive.

But back to Barrett and her relationship with this group.

But available facts paint a picture of an active pipeline between Notre Dame Law School, where Barrett taught, and ADF fellowships and staff roles. In fact, it can be a challenge to find a conservative professor in Notre Dame’s legal program who hasn’t built a long-term relationship with ADF.

Barrett’s close relationship to ADF comes through her paid work with the organization’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship, which has trained over 2,400 conservative law students in the tactics of masking anti-LGBTQ legal attacks under the guise of “religious liberty” casework. In 2017, Barrett argued her involvement with ADF was limited to lecturing Blackstone Fellows—not engaging in any of ADF’s foundational work of terrorizing the global LGBTQ community.

There is much much more in the article about her close association with the group and its extremist views, but that paragraph highlights the absolute lie she told to Sen. Franken.

There is nothing illegal about extremist views, there is nothing illegal about believing that homosexuality should be criminalized, but it IS illegal to lie to the Senate under oath about one’s relationship with such a group such in hearings while trying to get on a prestigious circuit court of appeals. This is especially true when she knew that had she told the truth her entire nomination would have been in trouble.

In terms of how she’d rule, that’s a foregone conclusion. Her life’s work has been to make the world safe for – and this is quite literally taken from the tenets of her religion – Christendom from the years 300-500 A.D. Who the hell knows how she’d rule on some securities cases or technical legal procedure? We don’t know. SHE doesn’t know. Her career has focused almost solely upon very narrow issues, all involving sex and a religious person’s “freedom” to just someone else’s sexual behavior.

We damned well DO know how she’ll rule on anything to do with women’s reproductive health and we mean right on down to access to birth control at all. We know that she’d favor “revisiting” the case that Alito and Thomas just “happened” to recently write needs “revisiting” – the gay marriage case – because in the age of Trump, it appears that all the rules are now thrown out including stare decisis, literally meaning “the thing is decided.” Why else would Thomas and Alito write about the gay marriage case needing “revisiting” now that their majority is assured? Stare Decisis is apparently one of those “things” that may be going out the door, if Alito and Thomas have their way. Everything else changed under Trump, why not the SCOTUS? And even if Roberts wanted to call off this whole deal, not wanting to be the chief forever associated with destroying the SCOTUS’s legitimacy, HE is now in the minority if this woman’s nominated.

But in the total of three (3!!) days that the Republicans have allotted the hearings on this woman’s beliefs (chaired by near certainly COVID positive Lindsey Graham), the Democrats must focus on this woman’s work with this group and the fact that she so obviously lied about her relationship with it under questioning by Senator Franken. We need four Republicans, we have two, already, that have said no, they won’t support her. We need two more. Proof that someone lied to Congress in her testimony, about a group that is a known hate group and very very much a part of her life, might be the key to getting two more of those votes.

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom