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When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you. And that's of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have

fought for for years in this country. That's Senator Diane Feinstein speaking about Notre Dame

law professor Amy Coney-Barritt at the 2017 confirmation hearing for appeals court nominees. Well,

the attempt to paint her as a religious nut or as a Roman Catholic ideologue fell short. And

Justice Barrett has continued to confound people as she took her position on the U.S. Supreme

Court. The headline from the New York Times,

how Amy Coney Barrett is confounding the right and the left. Welcome back to Issues, Et cetera.

I'm Todd Wilkin. Joining us to talk about the New York Times story, Terry Mattingly, he's Senior Fellow

on Communications and Culture at St. Constantine College

in Houston, Texas. He writes Rational Sheep, a Substact Newsletter on Faith, Family, and Mass Media.

He's author of the National On Religion column for the Andrews-McMeil Universal Syndicate,

and for two decades, you let the getreligion.org website. Terry, welcome back.

Glad to be here. Is there a religion angle in this New York Times story?

Well, to be perfectly blunt about it, I would argue that there is a huge religion angle in this piece,

but the Times didn't know what to do with it.

And I found that very interesting because there was a time when she was, Amy Coney Barrett was the nominee,

and soon thereafter, when the New York Times and a lot of other mainstream media were pretty much obsessed with this woman's religious beliefs and whether or not they would influence her career and to what degree they would influence her career on the Supreme Court, which makes it all the more interesting when they've decided that she

...