Conservatives on the US Supreme Court have the whole world fretting today about what they’re up to. Because, frankly, they seem hell-bent on turning America into a Taliban-style paradise … or Gilead.
They insist their job is just to apply their interpretation of what the Founding Fathers originally intended when they wrote the Constitution to the facts in each case. Never mind the intellectual dishonesty inherent in trying to apply the “original intent” of this 18th-century text in 21st-century contexts, which the drafters of that text never even imagined.
The illogical fallacy afoot is so obvious, it’s not even worthy of comment.
They have now re-imposed pre-Roe abortion restrictions on women. And iPINIONS fears these conservative justices have no compunction about re-imposing Jim-Crow restrictions on blacks.
In short, this Court seems hell-bent on handing down rulings that transform America into the Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale. The oppression of women that portends is plain for all to see. Indeed, no less a woman than Justice Amy Coney Barrett (aka Serena Joy…?) must realize, at long last, the hand she’s playing in making herself a second-class citizen.
After all, here is what no less a man than Justice Thomas said about their declared intent in this respect:
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Friday called for overturning the constitutional rights the court had affirmed for access to contraceptives and LGBTQ rights in an opinion concurring with the majority to decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
(The Hill, June 24, 2022)
An adaptation of Martin Niemöller’s poem of protest, “First They Came,” seems in order. Only instead of Nazis coming for Socialists, Trade Unionists, and Jews, we have Justices coming for voting rights for Blacks, abortion rights for women, and marriage rights for gays…
Of course, you’d be forgiven for wondering or despairing about a Black man spearheading what appears to be the racist, misogynistic, and homophobic mission of paternalistic white men. Except that you need only look at recent American history to understand the perverse, self-hating phenomenon that is Clarence Thomas.
After all, no Americans posed more purportedly principled opposition to gay rights than gay Republicans like Ken Melman, Jim Kolbe, and Mark Foley.
Sadly, ever since his humiliating confirmation hearing, Thomas has seemed possessed of a jurismanaical need to punish Democrats for causing it, and to rule against every interest they argue before the Supreme Court. Unsurprisingly, blacks have suffered the brunt of his vendetta.
Apropos of this, I fear having Ketanji Brown Jackson join him on the Court will only reinforce the feelings of resentment (and unworthiness) that sent him down this vengeful path in the first place. For he is bound to see in her everything he (still) hates about Anita Hill, who personifies the public humiliation that evidently still haunts him.
But Thomas clearly relishes appearing more interested in serving as a political hack for the Republican Party than as a justice on the Supreme Court. Because only this explains his upstaging Justice Alito’s majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade with a concurring one, in which he put Democrats on notice that same-sex marriages and even contraceptives are next.
Thomas cites strict adherence only to rights enumerated in the Constitution, and to those deeply rooted in US history. But that’s just a pretext for deploying a scorched-earth constitutional philosophy to make it seem principled.
Interestingly enough, though, this means that, like abortion and same-sex marriage, interracial marriage is in jeopardy. After all, it is neither enumerated in the Constitution nor deeply rooted in US history. But I refer you to the precedent of self-hating gay Republicans I cited earlier if you think being in an interracial marriage himself will give Thomas cause to pause.
Meanwhile, given the Trumpian fashion he follows these days, he probably couldn’t be happier that rulings at the Supreme Court are making so much noise. Because they are distracting from all the findings at the hearings before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection that are implicating him in crimes.
But I’ll end with this looming bit of poetic justice: The Republicans Thomas and his wife allegedly conspired with to overturn the 2020 presidential election are the same ones who conspired to deny Merrick Garland his seat on the Supreme Court. But now, as attorney general, Garland is lying in wait to prosecute Thomas and his wife for all their crimes, which that Jan. 6 committee is so diligently enumerating and documenting for all the world to see.
Related commentaries:
Coney Barrett… Brown Jackson…
Thomas… Garland…
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