Who put pubic hair on my Coke?
—Clarence Thomas as quoted by Anita Hill, testifying before the Judiciary Committee, 1991
In 2011, the liberal advocacy group Common Cause reported that between 2003 and 2007, Justice Thomas failed to report his wife’s earnings of around $700,000 from the Heritage Foundation, a Republican think tank. (A serious, if not criminal, omission on his financial disclosure form.) Thomas described the failure as “inadvertent.”
Justice Thomas also failed to fully report his involvement at a secret “political strategy” and fund-raising seminar organized by the Koch brothers at an exclusive resort near Palm Springs in 2008. Talk about your “activist judges.”
Thomas’s wife, Virginia, currently heads her own Republican consulting firm, describing herself as an “ambassador to the Tea Party.”
I mention Thomas’s wife as a possible explanation for the Justice’s consistently Right-Wing Supreme Court decisions: the man doesn’t want to sleep on the couch.
Justice Thomas provides two other theories guiding his interpretations of the Constitution. The first is his belief in “natural law.” Thomas first mentioned his faith in natural law during his confirmation hearings. Unfortunately, the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled him more on his pornography collection.I
In a nutshell, natural law holds that there is a divine legal code underlying the Constitution and that all laws must yield to a “Higher Authority”—namely, God.
An early example of how natural law was used can be found in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), a Supreme Court case in which Myra Bradwell had been denied admission to the Illinois State Bar because she was a woman. The Supreme Court upheld the lower Court’s ruling, its Chief Justice stating:
. . . that God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and that it belonged to men to make, apply and execute the laws, was regarded as an almost axiomatic truth.
Which goes to show how stupid you can be when you’re sure you know what God is up to.
To understand natural law, you have to go back to the mid-thirteenth century and the theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, divine or natural law is designed from God’s eternal laws as it is revealed to Man through the scriptures: the Old and New Testaments.
For the record, Aquinas also believed that heretics should be punished by death, along with such other felonies as forgery and fraud. Aquinas, who justified slavery (it’s in the Bible), was also reported to be able to levitate while praying.
Once you know that Aquinas is Justice Thomas’s point man for the Constitution, you have no trouble figuring out how Thomas would rule on Roe v. Wade should he ever get a whack at it.
Since God once commanded Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful, and multiply,” anything less should be seen as a violation of God’s natural law. Justice Thomas even referred to the right of married couples to use birth control as an “invention.”
Amazing, isn’t it, how God and Republicans think so much alike.
Thomas (who once studied for the priesthood) is no different than Scalia in believing the government should carry the sword as “minister of God to execute wrath upon the evildoers.” And that the Ten Commandments are “a symbol of the fact that government derives its authority from God.”
Justice Thomas, it seems, cannot distinguish between democracy, which requires debate and dissent, and religion, which needs only faith in ultimate authority. And in every case where Thomas chooses religion, democracy suffers.
Who knew we would get so sick of hearing from a judge who opens his mouth only once every ten years?
• • •
When Justice Thomas is not talking to God, he is wrapping himself in the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence remains the Right Wing’s last refuge to prove that America was founded by God’s Hand and Special Blessing. To do so, they quote Jefferson’s inspiring words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness . . .
By giving rights this divine origin, the Declaration elevates them to God-given and therefore they cannot be revoked or denied by anyone, including the King of England.II
The Declaration, remember, was the Founders’ justification for revolution. And because foreign nations could not get involved in a civil war, the Declaration of Independence was written so that the new country (already at war with England) could borrow money as an independent nation.
But the Founders and Framers never applied the language of the Declaration when writing the Constitution. There is no appeal to God or God-given law. In fact, the Constitution says plainly that the Constitution and the laws and treaties “in pursuance thereof . . . shall be the Supreme Law of the land.”
No matter. When Justice Thomas can’t claim Leviticus as precedent, he calls on the Declaration of Independence to justify his subjective, preconceived opinions.
For example, take the Supreme Court’s (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015) decision stating that the Constitution guarantees the right to same-sex marriage. In his homophobic dissent, Thomas claims that since God gives man his dignity (per the Declaration of Independence), it cannot be taken away by the government. He supports that argument with most peculiar logic. Here is Justice Thomas in his own words:
When the Framers proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” they referred to a vision of mankind in which all humans are created in the image of God and therefore of inherent worth. That vision is the foundation upon which the Nation was built. The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity any more than they lost their humanityIII [emphasis mine] because the government allowed them to be enslaved. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.
According to the Book of Thomas, therefore, the slave who saw his family auctioned off to the highest bidder suffered no loss of dignity. Perhaps Thomas did not read Thomas Jefferson on the subject:
The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise [of] . . . the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.
And Jefferson knew a thing or two about slavery.
So in this same bizarre way, Thomas is saying that since the government does not grant homosexuals benefits (like marriage), gays do not lose dignity by not getting them. Why? Because all dignity is given only by God!
Thomas also suggested, in the same dissent, that gays have been given enough liberties already. The right to travel is one. For example: “They have been able to travel freely around the country.”IV
Justice Thomas seems to think that just because gays have the right to spend a nude weekend in Palm Springs at the Bearfoot Inn (where clothes are optional), sip frozen daiquiris poolside, and splash each other with sunblock, that is all the freedom they need, and any aspiration to government-sponsored monogamy is strictly off-limits. Certainly, if God wanted homosexuals to marry, Clarence Thomas would have been the first to know.
Had Justice Thomas been a Federal judge back in Virginia in 1967, he would have sentenced himself and his white wife to two years in prison for miscegenation.
I. A far less dangerous fixation.
II. Even Scalia said that Constitutional appeals to the Declaration of Independence are irrelevant.
III. If a man in a white robe said that, they’d call it hate speech.
IV. Yes, Thomas actually said that.