Kavanaugh Dresses for Success

Philip Allen, “New Grand Inquisitor” (2018), digital photomontage based on El Greco, “Portrait of Cardinal Nino de Guevara” (1598), 10.933 X 6.753 inches (image courtesy the artist)

President Trump his stated that any Supreme Court nominee he put forth would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, and that women who had abortions should be punished. His Vice President, Mike Pence, has gone so far as to demand that women who choose to abort should be forced to conduct funerals for the aborted fetus.

El Greco painted this portrait of recent Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in one of his prior archetypal incarnations in the year 1600: Fernando Niño de Guevara, who was appointed Grand Inquisitor of Spain. According to Wikipedia, “During his tenure as Grand Inquisitor, the Spanish Inquisition burned 240 heretics, plus 96 in effigy. 1,628 other individuals were found guilty and subjected to lesser penalties.”

While Cardinal de Guevara was probably more interested in forcibly converting Jews to Catholicism and molesting altar boys than practicing rape techniques on unsuspecting teenage girls, the themes of punishment, entitlement, and preserving the right of the religious to do anything they want under cover of “textual” sanction, remains a constant.

Both men were and are deeply religious Catholics, which raises the question of whether Pope Francis will ever acknowledge a woman’s right to ownership of her body and its reproductive functions, thus pulling the “textual” rug out from under this kind of abusive, functionary thug.