Desperate partisans try to ‘binders full of women’ Amy Coney Barrett

Last-ditch efforts.

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It is amazing how quickly and easily a contrived anti-conservative talking point can take hold.

Opponents of Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett are acting aggrieved this week after she used the term “sexual preference” during Day Two of her Senate confirmation hearings. It is an offensive and outdated term, these people say, and it is very revealing that Barrett would use it.

Nearly as bad as this disingenuous criticism of the judge, who clearly meant no offense, is the speed at which it has gone mainstream.

On Tuesday, Barrett said, “I do want to be clear that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.”

MSNBC senior producer Kyle Griffin immediately pounced, seeking to shame the judge for problematic language.

“‘Sexual preference,’ a term used by Justice Barrett, is offensive and outdated,” he said in a note that has been shared by more than 26,000 social media users. “The term implies sexuality is a choice. It is not. News organizations should not repeat Justice Barrett's words without providing that important context.”

Griffin's complaint made its way almost immediately into the press and even Congress.

Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, repeated Griffin’s tweet nearly verbatim Tuesday during Barrett’s confirmation hearing.

“‘Sexual preference’ is an offensive and outdated term, and I don’t think you using it was an accident,” said the senator. “Sexual orientation is a key part of people’s lives.”

Barrett responded, “I certainly didn't mean and would never mean to use a term that would cause any offense in the LGBTQ community. If I did, I greatly apologize for that.”

The judge’s apology, of course, is not going to be enough for these people, because speech policing is rarely, if ever, about decency or even about anyone genuinely taking offense. It is almost always about setting tiger traps for one’s opponents.

PBS News’s Yamiche Alcindor highlighted Hirono’s remarks Tuesday, following them with a tweet that reads, “Note: ‘Sexual orientation’ is the accepted term.”

Alcindor would do better to police her own newsroom, which used the term “sexual preference” as recently as this year, than seek to cash in on a concerted effort to whip up a frenzy against Barrett.

Senior CNN political commentator David Axelrod also remarked after Hirono's performance, “I wonder if [Barrett] views heterosexuality as a ‘preference.’”

Axelrod did not pose this same question in 2018 when former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta used the term “sexual preference." Axelrod similarly had no objections in 2015 when former President Barack Obama used the term “lifestyle choice.”

Pro-LGBT publications also have gone hard after Barrett, portraying her as an out-of-touch homophobe.

The Advocate, for example, called her comments a “revealing moment.” That is an odd thing for the oldest and largest LGBT publication in the United States to say, considering it published an article last month using the term “sexual preference.” Pink News also claimed that Barrett had used “one of the oldest homophobic dogwhistles in the book,” which is an odd thing for it to allege since it published an article last year that used that exact terminology.

Merriam-Webster even updated its entry for “preference" Tuesday to include that the word’s usage in certain contexts may be “offensive.”

This is positively dystopian.

Let’s be honest: This talking point is an attempt by partisans to use language as a cudgel against a perceived opponent. They don’t want to encourage inclusivity. They want to poke holes in Barrett’s confirmation.

It is true that the American Psychological Association recommended in the 1980s that the public retire the phrase “sexual preference.” The group argued that the term “suggests a degree of voluntary choice that is not necessarily reported by lesbians and gay men and that has not been demonstrated in psychological research.”

But, as noted yesterday, the term continued to appear everywhere in major media and mainstream discourse, with no malice intended, even after the APA’s recommendation. It was not until 2006 that the Associated Press even updated its style guide to replace “sexual preference” with “sexual orientation.” Yet, even after that update, the term continues to show up in popular media, appearing everywhere from the Hill to National Public Radio to PBS to the BBC to the Wall Street Journal to Reuters to ABC News to the Associated Press to the Des Moines Register to Women’s Health.

The NCAA used the term in 2014. The NAACP used the term in 2016. Surely, no offense was intended.

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois used the term “sexual preference” during a floor speech in 2010. Two years later, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut did the same. Both men currently sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The term “sexual preference” appeared in 2014 in a press statement from the office of Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

Judith Heumann, the former special adviser for international disability rights at the U.S. Department of State under Obama, used the term “sexual preference” in 2016.

The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg used the term during a public appearance in 2017.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden used the term “sexual preference” in May of this year.

And so on.

As I wrote yesterday, it takes time for language and habits to change. That is why the APA itself said of its recommendation that “because no universal agreement exists on terminology, and because language and culture continually change, [its recommendations] should be considered helpful suggestions rather than rigid rules.” Just because people are not as up-to-date as they can be does not mean they intend offense. It does not imply something more sinister about their character.

The attempt this week to gin up anger over Barrett’s use of the term “sexual preference,” for which she has already apologized, is a shallow, ham-fisted attempt to paint her as a retrograde bigot.

But this is what happens when Democrats and their cheerleaders in the press run up against an opponent of unimpeachable character and credentials. They simply invent new ways to be angry, as they did in 2012 when they pretended to take offense at “binders full of women.”