WHY BARRETT MATTERS

We have developed, in our vapid superficiality, a habit of judging politicians and one another on the basis of who our secular  judges are, most particularly who are on the Supreme Court.  What escapes most of us is that those judgments extend to ourselves.

President Trump has taken perhaps the best step in his first term in the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to our highest court.  One can learn from the reactions  to her new status… and likelihood that she will help decide the course of America’s future.  The nation that became the United States was formed by religious people – mostly Christians and some Jews – men, and probably more importantly, women: their hands rocked the cradles.

While our comprehension of Biblical and other somewhat contemporaneous texts has certainly changed, the essential value of religious morality to the strength and success of the U. S. of A., can be denied only in ignorance.  Ignorance, sadly, doesn’t inhibit that class of “deniers” to any great degree.  In other words, a strong moral code, passed from generation to generation, is both crucial and comforting.

Enter Amy Coney Barrett, who has attracted vitriol – not political difference, vitriol – for what those somewhat aligned with her worldview can see no justification in the slightest.  Where does it come from?  How is it that half of the polity apparently distrusts or resents – if not hates – a thoroughly moral and honest person?

A large component of that vitriol comes from women.  Those like Senators Diane Feinstein, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and the legendary Masi Hirono, are unable to avoid nonsensical, disdain-laden questions or comments that leads one to deduce, it is Prudent to say, that they not only hate her politically, but are, in fact, envious of her.  But, envy aimed at what, exactly?

Moral rectitude.  Females who have spent decades denying their crucial roles of both civilizing – moralizing – their men, and of keeping their children on a morally straight path as they (ostensibly) learn to become adults in charge of cultural norms applied to economics, commerce, production and defense of family and community, find themselves so uncomfortable with the responsibilities of woman-hood, that a woman who has no reason for such discomfort is to be deeply resented.

Inherently there is a threat to many women that Amy Barrett, and not they, will be a best example of American woman- and mother-hood.  Even her college sorority has virtually disavowed her and her extraordinary success.  The “sisterhood” apparently depends not on gender, a reactionary concept, but on the purity of one’s rejection of religious-based morals.

Barrett doesn’t waver; her moral pillar requires neither comparison nor negotiation.  It need not be measured against fads or trends or popular opinion.  Whether one shares her complete philosophy or not, he or she ought to have the wisdom to respect it… and her.  That sort of respect has not been – and is not being – inculcated through the institutions of society that are its only source: parents (mothers AND fathers), churches and, as reinforcement, schools.  Barrett exemplifies and makes real, the superiority of the two-parent, responsible family model… and it is frightening.

If a society wished, freely and collectively, to restore and strengthen the one form of foundational social engineering proven successful: two-parent, economically independent families, that society would formalize through government and every reinforcing institution, every possible encouragement of that structure.  The question, automatically posed by the stark and living color example of Amy Coney Barrett’s family, to those who wonder about the future of the United States, is whether we have the collective sense to shift our policies toward her model of success?

We’ll have to cleanse our education and purge public schools of socialist teachers and administrators.  We’ll have to teach our children all of American history, both bad and good, and pass along the best of our founding philosophy so that our next generations recognize how to repair, adjust correct, improve the application of those ideals to inevitable problems of complex civilization.

We’ll have to change our entire approach and process of delivering public assistance such that the worst tendencies of human nature are not rewarded, and the desire – or ability – to attain to better lives is rewarded.  By itself, this change to public policy holds the greatest promise for the quality of life and continuation of the American dream for ourselves and all other nations who aspire to freedom and the end of poverty.

Trump has placed the American success model at center stage.  One hopes those who feel badly or resentful can examine their own philosophies, perhaps to reform them.