Starting with Barrett: She does indeed belong to an extreme, charismatic wing of the Catholic Church called People of Praise, which actually did serve as the inspiration for Margaret Atwood in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid\u2019s Tale.<\/b> The book was published in 1985 after Atwood \u201cdelayed writing it for about three years after I got the idea because I felt it was too crazy,\u201d she told The New York Times Book Review in 1986. \u201cThen two things happened. I started noticing that a lot of the things I thought I was more or less making up were now happening, and indeed more of them have happened since the publication of the book.\u201d Specifically: \u201cThere is a sect now, a Catholic charismatic spinoff sect, which calls the women handmaids. They don\u2019t go in for polygamy of this kind but they do threaten the handmaids according to the biblical verse I use in the book\u2014sit down and shut up.\u201d Yeah, that\u2019s Barrett\u2019s church. Except they\u2019ve dropped the \u201chead\u201d moniker for male leadership and \u201chandmaids\u201d title for women who keep their fellow women in line because the television series based on the novel forced a change. They are now all called \u201cleaders,\u201d who direct such intimate life decisions of members as who they marry, where they live, and how they raise their children.<\/del><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is not actually true. Atwood's inspiration was the People Of Hope. The Federalist Society\u2019s list of approved Supreme Court nominees, from which the nominee will be drawn, has a handful of youngish women wingnuts, two of whom seem to top the list for the vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30456"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30466,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30456\/revisions\/30466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}