Vol Texan wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2020 4:20 pm
It's actually a bit deeper than that. The Babylon Bee story is referring to a 'controversy' stirred up in a
fake news article first published by Newsweek. In that article, titled, "How Charismatic Catholic Groups Like Amy Coney Barrett's People of Praise Inspired 'The Handmaid's Tale'", they posited that the base storyline in the dystopian novel
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood was inspired by a a group that Barrett belongs to.
This proposed link was
completely debunked by Constance Grady on Vox this month. Apparently, the book was inspired by a different group named People of Hope, not Barrett's group People of Praise.
Atwood herself ain't helping things all that much. Here's a piece from the National Review just a few days ago: "
Margaret Atwood Contradicts Herself on Whether Judge Barrett’s Religious Group Inspired The Handmaid’s Tale." Published last week, author Kate Schatz, as part of a program with The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, interviewed Atwood, and Atwood denied that the People of Praise inspired her book. The very next day later Politico did its own follow-up piece, and "Atwood seemingly backtracked, saying she was not sure if People of Praise had inspired her work, and saying she could not say anything definitive without consulting her records — which are currently locked away in a University of Toronto archive that is closed because of the pandemic. 'Unless I can go back into the clippings file, I hesitate to say anything specific,' Atwood told Politico in a statement. Politico made no mention of Atwood’s contradictory comments, which were published just one day earlier."