Amy Coney Barrett Line In The SandHundreds of illiberal left-wing literati demand Penguin Random House deplatform pro-life Supreme Court justice
Rod Dreher
Oct 29, 2022
This story involves my publisher, Sentinel:
Hundreds of Penguin Random House staffers and other literary professionals are calling on the publishing company to cut ties with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and to cancel her upcoming book.
The publishing house came under fire Friday after an open letter bearing 520 signatures was made public. In it, the dissenters call for a better balance of freedom of speech and duty of care, citing Penguin’s $2 million book deal with Coney Barrett as “a case where a corporation has privately funded the destruction of human rights with obscene profits.”
Among the list are a surprising number of employees of Penguin Random House, the parent company of the Sentinel imprint. PRH is a vast corporation, so it's not necessarily the case that these signatories represent a significant number of the publisher's employees (and note well that there are signatories who identify themselves as working for other publishers). The "open letter" says, in part:
This is not just a book that we disagree with, and we are not calling for censorship. Many of us work daily with books we find disagreeable to our personal politics. Rather, this is a case where a corporation has privately funded the destruction of human rights with obscene profits. Coney Barrett is free to say as she wishes, but Penguin Random House must decide whether to fund her position at the expense of human rights in order to inflate its bottom line, or to truly stand behind the values it proudly espouses to hold.
Oh, bullshit. Of course they're calling for censorship! This is what the Left does! They do not believe that a female Supreme Court justice who believes in the sanctity of unborn human life (as do tens of millions of Americans) should have a platform. They denounce their own employer, in public, in an effort to censor Justice Barrett.
I haven't spoken to anyone at Sentinel about this controversy, but I have every faith that PRH will stand behind Sentinel in this controversy. It would be right of them to issue a strong statement of support on Monday, not only for Sentinel, but for the purpose of publishing books in a liberal democracy. These censorious leftists who have marched through the institutions are a threat to free expression, and to the free exchange of ideas. They don't simply oppose what Justice Barrett stands for; they believe she should not have the opportunity to make her case in the public square.
This is a moral betrayal of publishing, carried out by an unaccountable internal elite who wish to set the boundaries on discourse to exclude even mainstream conservative ideals and beliefs.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/amy-coney-barrett-line-in-the-sand/
