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Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" Was NOT Inspired by "People of Praise"

Trump's new nominee for the Supreme Court, Amy Comy Barrett, belongs to a weird Catholic sect known as "People of Praise." I myself believed for several weeks the story going around that "People of Praise" was the inspiration for Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel of female subjugation, "The Handmaid's Tale."

Turns out that's not the case. Rather, "The Handmaid's Tale" was inspired by a different weird Catholic sect known as "People of Hope."

The story is debunked in this article, by Constance Grady, of Vox:

On Saturday, President Donald Trump chose Notre Dame law professor and federal appellate judge Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee to take Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. The news threatens to reignite a storm of controversy around Barrett’s religion that has been building since 2017.

Barrett is a devout Catholic. She has written before about her belief that Catholicism should affect a judge’s jurisprudence, and Democrats discussed her views widely when she was nominated to the federal bench in 2017. In a moment that has become infamous on the right, Sen. Dianne Feinstein declared that “the dogma lives loudly within you” during Barrett’s hearing, a phrase some conservatives took to be an attack on Barrett’s Catholicism.

Barrett is also part of a small Catholic group known as People of Praise, and that’s where her religious affiliations get especially touchy. Some liberals argue Barrett’s membership in this group, which teaches that husbands are the heads of families and have authority over their wives, signals that she will hand down religiously motivated conservative opinions if confirmed to the Supreme Court, particularly when it comes to women’s reproductive freedom and the rights of the queer community.

Meanwhile, conservatives reply that Barrett is a high-powered federal judge who is also married, so she can’t be all that oppressed by her husband, and that liberal critiques of the way Barrett’s religion affects her judicial obligations are nothing more than anti-Catholic prejudice at work.

One of the weirder ways this debate has played out since Barrett was first discussed as a potential Supreme Court nominee is the fight over whether or not People of Praise, the group she belongs to, is also one of the inspirations for The Handmaid’s Tale. In Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel (and its recent TV adaptation), fertile women are forced to live as childbearing slaves called handmaids. The group isn’t an established inspiration for the book — but the story has developed legs anyway.

The inaccurate link between the People of Praise and Atwood’s story, perpetuated by a series of confusing coincidences and uneven fact-checking, first emerged in a Newsweek article and was later picked up by Reuters. Both articles have since been corrected, but the right was furious at both. The Washington Examiner called it a “smear that just won’t die.” Fox News noted several other outlets have mentioned Barrett and The Handmaid’s Tale in the same story.

To be absolutely clear: People of Praise is not an inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale, and the group does not practice sexual slavery or any of the other dystopian practices Atwood wrote about in her novel. But the argument over whether or not the two are connected reflects the deeply contentious atmosphere in which Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court occurs — and the immense symbolic weight The Handmaid’s Tale carries in American popular culture.

The Handmaid’s Tale is actually inspired by People of Hope. They’re different from People of Praise.

Two coincidences led to the idea of a People of Praise–Handmaid’s Tale connection. The first coincidence is that the People of Praise once had a religious rank called “handmaid.” As reported by the New York Times in 2017, People of Praise members are all accountable to a personal adviser. Those advisers offer guidance on major life decisions, including, per the Times, “whom to date or marry, where to live, whether to take a job or buy a home, and how to raise children.” And these advisers used to be called “heads” when they were men and “handmaids” when they were women. They have since been renamed “leaders.”

The second coincidence is that when Margaret Atwood explained her Handmaid’s Tale inspirations to the New York Times in 1987, she described one of them as “a Catholic charismatic spinoff sect, which calls the women handmaids.” Atwood did not at the time name the sect, so when her quote resurfaced in 2020, it was very easy for some readers to think, Well, People of Praise is a Catholic charismatic spinoff sect that calls the women handmaids, so there you go. Accordingly, on September 21, Newsweek reported that People of Praise was one of Atwood’s inspirations for The Handmaid’s Tale.

Asked about her inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale by Politico as the controversy heated up, Atwood said she wasn’t sure which group she was talking about in 1987. Her archive of work and research is at the University of Toronto, where she can’t currently access it due to Covid-19 restrictions. But she’s on the record as going through her Handmaid’s Tale archives for journalists plenty of times in the past, and during those interviews, she’s always cited People of Hope, a different Catholic charismatic spinoff that calls women handmaids.

Specifically, People of Hope is a fundamentalist group in New Jersey that some former members have said behaves like a cult and which has allegedly arranged marriages between teenagers. The People of Hope call wives “handmaids,” and when Atwood saw that word in an Associated Press clipping about the group, she underlined it in pen. It’s rumored that it’s here that she developed the idea of using the name to begin with.

In a weird wrinkle, the timing of the lore here doesn’t quite work out. Reporting for the Star-Ledger in 2017, Tom Deignan found that the story didn’t hit the AP until after The Handmaid’s Tale came out in 1985, meaning that Atwood couldn’t have pulled the word “handmaid” from that mythical news article after all. But regardless, the AP clipping in Atwood’s archives, the one that she always shows reporters, is about People of Hope. And while it’s plenty plausible that Atwood has indulged in a little self-mythologizing about her creative process over the years, it’s not really that relevant to any questions about Amy Coney Barrett and her religious leanings today.

The outrage over the controversy speaks to the symbolic weight Handmaid’s Tale holds today in American pop culture

The slippage between People of Praise handmaids, People of Hope handmaids, and Margaret Atwood handmaids is where this whole misunderstanding originated. And it is, in its own way, telling about the world Atwood was writing about in 1984 when she built Gilead, her theocratic dystopia.

Atwood was drawing from the cultural norms of lots of different North American charismatic Christian groups at the time, including harmless ones. The reason there’s so much confusion about exactly where she took the word handmaid from is that handmaid is the kind of word a lot of North American charismatic Christian groups were into in 1984: suggestive of purity, duty, and feminine obedience to divine will.

Again, that does not mean these groups were practicing sexual slavery. It means they were working with a very specific vocabulary, and the way Atwood made her dystopia feel real was by skillfully mimicking them.

But that this slippage occurred in 2020 is also telling about how immensely fearful people are, on both the right and the left, about America’s future — and how powerful The Handmaid’s Tale is as a symbol of what that future might look like.

People on the left look at Amy Coney Barrett and see someone who has denounced both abortion and marriage equality in explicitly religious terms, someone who they fear will, if seated on the Supreme Court, turn back the clock on both those issues. They see a symbol of the same fear that drove protesters to don Handmaid robes at the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018: the fear that women are going to lose control of their bodies, and that when that day comes, we might just as well be in Gilead. So they have linked Barrett to The Handmaid’s Tale because The Handmaid’s Tale is now our culture’s most potent symbol for the idea of a world in which women’s bodies are not their own.

People on the religious right, meanwhile, see the left’s focus on Barrett’s Catholicism as confirmation that American Christianity is losing its cultural power, and that they may soon become a persecuted minority. Articles that mistakenly link Barrett’s People of Praise to The Handmaid’s Tale, seen through this lens, become examples of the left trying to make Barrett’s religion a disqualifying mark against her, and by extension to make all Christian faith disqualifying for higher office.

The result is a controversy about two political parties that increasingly see themselves as pushed to the breaking point — and who believe they have no space left to interact with the other side in good faith.

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Helpful, Positive Input From The Right (well, maybe not so much)

This is taken from Brian Stelter's "Reliable Sources," a collection of comments by our friends on the right last spring, when the CDC predicted there would be 200,000 American deaths from COVID-19. 

 

The United States hit a tragic milestone on Tuesday, surpassing 200,000 deaths from the coronavirus. It is difficult to process that vast loss of life. The figure represents mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, cousins and uncles, friends and coworkers.

 

It's a number no one ever wanted to hit. But it didn't blindside us. The early models did predict it. It's hard to forget the White House press conference back in March in which the task force told the public to brace for 100,000 to 240,000 deaths.

 

Most news organizations soberly reported the warning and took it seriously. But many top personalities in right-wing media did not. Instead, they attacked the models and suggested health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci were alarmists. And when one model briefly lowered its projection to 60,000 deaths (with some caveats), these figures seized on the news, touting it as supposed proof of how great the White House's response had been and how unreliable the health experts had been.

So as the US crosses this terrible milepost of 200,000 dead, it's worth looking back at those who attacked the models, the health experts, and the media. Here are some comments made in April from top conservative commentators and personalities: 

>> Rush Limbaugh: "It's now down to 60,000. What happened to 240,000? What happened to 100,000 to 200,000? What happened to 240,000?" 

>> Brian Kilmeade: "The fact is, when someone says 200,000 people die, oops, I mean 60,000. And it's not going to be right away, it's going to be in August. That's how good we are doing and how off the models were..."

 >> Bill O'Reilly: “The [death toll] projections that you just mentioned are down to 60,000, I don’t think it will be that high..."

>> Candace Owens: "FACT: we went from 2.2 million, to 100,000, to 60,000 predictive #coronavirus deaths because the models were always bulls**t, the media was always lying, and the virus was never as fatal as the experts that are chronically wrong about everything, prophesized..." 

 >> Laura Ingraham: "They were off by a factor of 33 from 2.2 million projected COVID deaths at the top, which was terrifying to a little bit more than 60,000 deaths projected today..." 

 >> Mark Levin: "We've seen these numbers, these so-called models and the data over the last six to eight weeks. They have fluctuated wildly. Millions might die. Hundreds of thousands might die. Now, they're saying 60,000 give or take, maybe less than 60,000...." 

 >> Tucker Carlson: "Sixty thousand deaths -- that's a very big number. ... Yet, at the same time, it is far fewer than many expected. It is a much lower number...." 

 >> Martha MacCallum: "You cannot help but look at the numbers that caused it and the models which were incorrect that really were one of the biggest push points to shut down the United States economy. It is quite possible that you’re going to end up with numbers of fatalities in this Covid-19 tragedy of those that have been affected that will be south of the numbers in the 2018 flu season..." 

 >> Dinesh D'Souza: "Most people have no idea how way off the #Coronavirus models have been. A nutcase virus denier who predicted ZERO deaths would be closer to the mark (ie to the current 60,000 projection) than the best-case scenarios, taking into account social distancing, of 100-240,000 deaths..." 

>> Jim Hoft: "STUNNING! IHME Reduces Their Model Predictions AGAIN! — Now Say Peak Is ON EASTER and Only 60,000 Deaths …Like a Typical Flu!" 

 It's important to revisit these comments, given how many of these commentators are still misleading the public on the coronavirus and the administration's response today. Fox News, talk radio, and right-wing websites were brimming with commentary playing down the virus back in April — and, in many respects, they still are today, even with a staggering death toll of 200,000 deaths. The arguments have changed, but the dishonesty has not.

Corrections or apologies from these folks? Crickets . . .

 

RT (Russia Today) Deepfakes Trump

Trump video:

Democratic Domination Of The Popular Vote

Since 1992 (28 years ago), there have been 7 presidential elections. They were won by the following:

1992: Bill Clinton
1996: Bill Clinton
2000: George W. Bush
2004: George W. Bush
2008: Barack Obama
2012: Barack Obama
2016: Donald Trump

The Democratic candidate for president has won the popular vote in 6 of those 7 elections. 

In those 7 elections, Republicans received 374,290,307 votes; Democrats received 403,086,894 votes. Democrats received 28,796,587 more votes than Republicans, an average of 4,113,798 more votes per year.

In those 7 elections, Democrats have won 4 times (16 years); Republicans have won 3 times (12 years). The only time a Republican president won the popular vote was Bush over Kerry, 2004, by a margin of 3,000,176 votes.

 

Notorious RBG: The Umbrella

In 2013, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice Roberts voted to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act (declaring the Day of Jubilee, as Charlie Pierce puts it). In a scathing dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote:

Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court’s opinion today. The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled. … One would expect more from an opinion striking at the heart of the Nation’s signal piece of civil-rights legislation...Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

It's raining -- hard.

The "Lost Cause"

 Here's the Wikipedia entry for "The Lost Cause":

The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, or simply the Lost Cause, is an American pseudo-historical, negationist ideology which advocates the belief that the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was a just and heroic one. This ideology furthered the idea that slavery was just and moral, under the ruse that it brought worthwhile economic prosperity. The ideology was used to perpetuate racism and racist power structures during the Jim Crow era in the American South.  It endorses the supposed virtues of the antebellum South and views the war as a struggle that was primarily waged in order to save the Southern way of life or to defend 'states' rights,' such as the right to secede from the Union, in the face of overwhelming 'Northern aggression.' At the same time, the Lost Cause minimizes or completely denies the central role of slavery and white supremacy in both the buildup to and outbreak of the war.

The southern states seceding from the Union in 1861, immediately prior to the Civil War, issued proclamations giving reasons for their course of action. Modern-day revisionists try to gloss over the issue of slavery, maintaining that the principal causes of secession were related to economics; the industrial north was determined to subjugate the agrarian south, treating it as a colony to be exploited.

If you read the declarations of secession, you will find that they are quite pointed: The rebellion was principally in opposition to the North forcing the abolition of slavery.

Here is the declaration of Mississippi (read it; it's short), adopted during a convention of State delegates from January 7-26, 1861:

A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.

The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.

The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.

The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.

It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.

It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.

It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.

It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.

It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.

It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.

It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.

It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.

It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.

It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.

It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.

It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.

Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.

Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.

You decide: was slavery a central reason for Mississippi's secession?

 

Funny Papers? Not So Much ...

 Click here for an article entitled "Totally Under Control": a comic strip presentation of how Trump and the U.S. on one side, and South Korea on the other, reacted to the COVID-19 virus.