(Headline USA) Publisher Penguin Random House said it is sticking by its decision to publish Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s upcoming book in spite of leftist backlash.
“We remain fully committed to publishing authors who, like Justice Barrett, substantively shape today’s most important conversations,” Adrian Zackheim with Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Random House, told the Wall Street Journal.
“[Sentinel] publishes books so that people can read them, and evaluate them on their own,” Zackheim added. “In an intelligent free society we need to disseminate ideas in a robust form so that we can discuss them.”
More than 600 leftist writers and editors sent a letter to Penguin Random House last month demanding that they cancel Barrett’s book deal, citing the court’s decision this summer to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that overturned Roe hinged on exactly what Coney Barrett’s book is reportedly about—the judiciary’s role and ‘how judges are not supposed to bring their personal feelings into how they rule,’” the letter said.
“Yet, it seems this is exactly what Coney Barrett has done, inflicting her own religious and moral agenda upon all Americans while appropriating the rhetoric of even-handedness—and Penguin Random House has agreed to pay her a sum of $2 million to do it.”
The leftists went on to claim that by publishing Barrett’s book, Penguin Random House would violate both its own code of conduct and international “human rights.”
“This is not just a book that we disagree with, and we are not calling for censorship,” the letter said. “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,” the letter continued.
