Long before the news broke that President Trump planned to nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court, special interest groups had begun their vitriolic smear campaign.

Barrett is a highly accomplished professional woman: She is a former Supreme Court clerk, a former big firm lawyer, a professor of Constitutional Law and Civil Procedure, and a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. And, on top of all that, she has seven children — two of whom she and her husband adopted from Haiti and one with special needs.  

As a scholar, a teacher, a jurist, and a mother, Judge Barrett is the living embodiment of the women’s movement and all of the things that trailblazers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg fought so hard for. Judge Barrett, quite literally, has found a way to “have it all.”

And, yet, rather than celebrate her, so-called women’s advocates have decided to attack her for it.

In a disgustingly sexist Tweet, feminist writer Vanessa Grigoriadis says:

I guess one of the things I don’t understand about Amy Comey Barrett is how a potential Supreme Court justice can also be a loving, present mom to seven kids? Is this like the Kardashians stuffing nannies in the closet and pretending they’ve drawn their own baths for their kids.

While some feminists hypocritically attack Barrett for being a working mother, others take the opposite approach, falsely painting her as a crazy extremist who wants to impose a theocracy and prevent women from working outside the home.

Newsweek published a piece claiming that Barrett, who is Catholic, is affiliated with a religious group that was the inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. 

Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review reports that Refinery29 called her “the Potential RBG Replacement Who Hates Your Uterus.” (The Left-wing online publication seems now to have altered its offensive headline.)

On Twitter, activists called her “a handmaiden to the patriarchy and an insult to the memory of RBG.” 

The attacks on Barrett are so ludicrous that the satire site Babylon Bee mocked the smear with a fake headline that read, “Amy Coney Barrett Holds Press Conference in Handmaid’s Tale Costume Just to Mess with Liberals.”

Funny as this meme may be, the attacks on Barrett are anything but.

In what is perhaps a new low for those who specialize in vilifying nominees to the federal bench, activists have begun questioning whether the Barretts’ Haitian children were legally adopted.

From an account that has since been made private, Democratic operative Dana Houle tweeted: “I would love to know which adoption agency Amy Coney Barrett & her husband used to adopt the two children they brought here from Haiti.”

Likewise, activist John Brougher, Managing Director of Tom Steyer’s NextGenAmerica, demanded to know more about the circumstances of the adoptions, claiming that “transracial adoption is fraught with trauma and potential for harm, and everything I see here is deeply concerning.” Brougher has since deleted the Tweet and also made his account private, but it is captured here:

We know by now that activists who want the Supreme Court to behave like a super-legislature and impose progressive policy agenda by judicial fiat will go to any lengths to defeat a nominee who understands that the role of a judge is to say what the law is, not what it should be. 

But is disparaging other women really the best way to  honor the legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg?