Hundreds of people have signed a letter demanding that Penguin Random House cancel its contract for the publication of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett's book, which reportedly contains her memoirs and tells the story of the overturning of the landmark ruling on Roe v. Wade, the right to abortion.
The letter, signed by more than 600 people, demands that Barrett's $2 million deal with the publisher be broken and that the decision to publish her book be reevaluated.
"It hurts democracy"
The first sentence of the letter calling to censure the Supreme Court justice says: "We care deeply about freedom of expression." It then demanded the publisher deny Amy Coney Barrett the right to freely express herself by not publishing her memoirs of her life. According to the text:
We recognize that harm is done to a democracy not only in the form of censorship, but also in the form of assault on inalienable human rights. As such, we call on Penguin Random House to recognize its own history and corporate responsibility commitments by reevaluating its decision to move forward with publishing Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett's forthcoming book.
It goes on to accuse Barrett and her fellow conservative justices of "dismantling protections for the human rights to privacy, self-determination, and bodily autonomy along with the federal right to abortion in the United States," and uses the United Nations and Human Rights Watch (which do not rule on the constitutionality of laws in the country) as the authorities to justify their claims:
International human rights organizations widely recognize abortion access as a fundamental human right and have condemned the U.S. Supreme Court's decision. In fact, Human Rights Watch notes that 'the human rights on which the right to access abortion is predicated are set out in theUnited Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document to which Penguin Random House's parent company commits itself in Section 2.2.1 of its Code of Conduct.
Leftists point out that publishing Barrett's book causes Penguin Random House to violate "its own Code of Conduct and fail to comply with international human rights." "This is not just a book we don't agree with, and we're not asking for censorship." They go on to justify the publisher canceling the book:
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.... We the undersigned have made the decision to stand by our duty of care while upholding freedom of expression. We cannot stand idly by while our industry misuses free speech to destroy our rights.
According to BPR Business & Politics: "The Orwellian idea that the free speech must be censored to save it is truly a sign of today's twisted times in which the left runs roughshod over the constitutional rights of Americans by deferring authority to unelected globalist bodies that are overly hostile to longstanding American principles."
