That you will always keep in mind that your legal career is but a means to an end, and as Father Jenkins told you this morning, that end is building the kingdom of God.
—Amy Coney Barrett in a 2006 speech to Notre Dame graduates
Now that's some scary stuff — just whose kingdom? — which has as much business sitting on the US Supreme Court as Trump has in the White House.
This nation is the world's oldest representative democracy precisely because it was founded on secular grounds, thereby avoiding the kinds of combative religious fanaticism that had plagued and bloodied Europe for centuries. A failure or refusal to embrace such fundamental historical background belies her Scalia-mentored reputation of "intellectual rigor."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein put it perfectly in 2017 at Barrett's appeals court hearing: "When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country."
The senator's remark was a sober, religiously unprejudiced opinion directed only at intoxicated religious bias, which had no business on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, either.
Yet Senate Republicans will, as they are invariably wont to do, battle Democrats' conscientious, dispassionate objections to Barrett's peculiar beliefs "by daring liberals to demonize a religious woman," writes the Times.
Such is the essence of cheap demagoguery, without which the Republican Party would cease to exist. Let us pray.