Sarah Jones at NY Magazine compares our newly nominated Supreme Court Justice with her proper antecedent: Phyllis Schlafly. And she makes this brilliant observation:
Conservative women with professional lives often invite accusations of hypocrisy: The label dogged Schlafly from the 1970s until the end of her life. But liberals don’t help themselves or any of their causes by taking the right-wing’s bait. Something deeper and more threatening than hypocrisy is at work. Schlafly was a pioneer for women. She uncovered the great loophole. For her successors in the Christian right, there is now one acceptable way to take a piece of male authority for themselves, and it runs through professional anti-feminism. The Schlafly track is about power, not ideological purity. Barrett may become its greatest success — a culture warrior almost without equal.
For all the power the right wing is about to hand her, though, Barrett has indeed chosen a self-limiting ideology, and not just because of her views on Roe. Conservative women aren’t interested solely in abolishing abortion, or in limiting the scope of modern gender equality laws. Schlafly was an anti-communist who belonged to the John Birch Society before she ever campaigned against the ERA. Her anti-feminism comprised one strand of a comprehensively dangerous ideology. The women who serve the Trump administration aren’t much different, and neither is Barrett. A Supreme Court justice with right-wing perspectives on labor, the environment, immigration, and criminal justice can harm women from all backgrounds in all aspects of their lives. That is the intention, and not the accidental byproduct, of constitutional originalism. As embraced by jurists like Barrett and her old boss, Antonin Scalia, originalism is its own dogma; the extension of a political theology committed to an older and more exclusionary version of America.
Barrett understands all that. She’s exactly as intelligent as her advocates say, and she’s made all her choices with a sound mind. Her reward is power. If she’s confirmed by the Senate, she’ll be able to finish what Schlafly once started. She could help lock in Trump for another four years. She’ll be able to deal democracy and yes, the feminist movement the blows the Christian right has dreamed of landing for years.
You have to love these right-wing women. They happily take advantage of all the gains that were attained from the sweat and blood of feminists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and then spend their lives working to dismantle them. Hypocrisy in the service of raw power permeates every inch of conservatism.