Roe v. Wade was overturned by a single vote. The case that overturned it was decided 6-3, but Chief Justice Roberts only concurred in reversing the lower court decision on narrower grounds, and wasn’t in favor of completely scrapping Roe v. Wade.
Without Amy Cony Barrett’s vote, Roe v. Wade would have remained law, albeit in a shrunken form. But was it actually her vote, or someone else’s — not on the court — that decided Roe v. Wade’s fate?
Barrett is a longtime member of a secretive Catholic sect calling itself “People of Praise,” which exercises “dominance over members’ lives” and calls for “complete obedience of women to their husbands” (see story here). Her ties to the group run deep; while in law school, she lived with the group’s founder and his family, and her father held a leadership role in the group. She herself served as a “handmaid” in the group.
Raw Story says (here) a former group member “stated in a sworn affidavit filed in the 1990s that Kevin Ranaghan,” the group’s founder, “exerted almost total control over her when she lived in the family’s household and made all decisions about her dating relationships and finances” (see story here).
The Guardian says, “Barrett has said she is a ‘faithful Catholic’ whose religious beliefs would not ‘bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge’.” But her deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, while going against what two-thirds of the American people wanted, conformed perfectly to Catholic doctrine on abortion. We already know she got confirmed to the court by lying about Roe v. Wade being settled law; so isn’t it plausible she’s lying about this, too?
Now there’s another question to ponder. Being that she’s a member of a Catholic sect that requires its female members to conform to its doctrine of male domination, who really decided how she would vote on Roe v. Wade? Her, or her husband, who is not a judge and wasn’t elected or appointed by anyone to make one of the most consequential American legal decisions of the past century? Believing, as she does, that she owes absolute obedience to her husband, wouldn’t she vote on the court as he tells her to? And wouldn’t the male of this legal family be making the legal decisions?
Photo below: Barrett with her supreme overlord, Acting Justice Jesse Barrett
