Opinion
On the Confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett Sophia Lee
The
confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett was a tactical move, one that went far beyond the scope of politics. It is no coincidence that in the wake of demands for massive structural change, we have been met with denial, ridicule, and outright violence from one side of the political aisle and complete apathy from the other. Much more than an obvious power grab, it is a message to marginalized communities across the nation: no matter how much progress we make, no matter how far we come, we will never be safe as long as we are subject to the whims of an institution that depends on oppression to function properly. Barrett has been flagrant in her attempts to strip the LGBTQ+ community of our rights, often leveling the “strong arm of justice” against our very existence. Despite only being appointed to the federal appeals court just three years ago, she has made countless moves to undermine the protections we’ve been afforded. In 2016, in a lecture she gave at the Jackson University Public Policy In-
stitute, Barrett defended Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas’s dissenting opinion on the ruling of Obergefell v. Hodges, a landmark case in which state bans on gay marriage was deemed unconstitutional (Morrow). Within the same lecture, she claimed that Title IX protections should not be extended to members of the trans community all the while misgendering trans women as “physiological males” (Morrow). Her stance on reproductive rights is, as one can imagine, willfully ignorant of the complexities of abortive practices, making no distinction between the different situations in which an abortion might be necessary including: in the case of sexual assault, potential harm to the pregnant party, fetal diagnoses, etc. In 2018, Barrett was one among four judges that suggested that Indiana laws requiring funerals for aborted or miscarried fetuses were constitutional, adding also that banning abortions on the basis of the child’s sex, race, and developmental disability was perfectly lawful (“Statement: Judge…”). The list goes on and on. And now, handed to her on
