In what is for her a typical rant, Whoopi Goldberg of The View used her forum on that program on Monday to tell Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas that he “better hope that they don’t come for you, Clarence, and say ‘you should not be married to your wife,’ who happens to be white.”
Goldberg was angry about Thomas’ role in the reversal of the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade. Thomas was one of six judges who upheld the Mississippi law making illegal any abortions performed after 15 weeks, and one of five who went further and reversed the Roe decision that led to over 60 million unborn babies being killed in their mothers’ womb.
Apparently, Justice Thomas particularly bothered Goldberg because he is a black person, and Goldberg, who is a black person, seems to believe all black individuals should think like her on the issue of abortion and on other issues.
“What’s next? Clarence Thomas is signaling they would like to get rid of contraception. Do you understand, sir? No, because you don’t have to use it.”
Goldberg added, “We (African-Americans) were not in the Constitution either,” in reference to the majority decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito, that held the regulation of abortion was not one of the enumerated powers given to Congress in the U.S. Constitution. “We were not even people. You better hope that they don’t come for you, Clarence, and say ‘you should not be married to your wife,’ who happens to be white. Because they will move back.”
“And you better hope nobody says, ‘You know, well, you’re not in the Constitution. You’re back to being a quarter of a person.’ Because that’s not going to work either.”
In his concurring opinion with the majority that struck down Roe v. Wade, Thomas noted that there are other prior decisions of the Supreme Court that were also based on the same erroneous premise as Roe v. Wade, such as the Obergefell ruling that declared same-sex marriage was protected by the “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment. In particular, Goldberg was alluding to the 1965 Supreme Court decision of Griswold v. Connecticut that said the state of Connecticut could not ban contraception as it was a violation of the “right of privacy.” In its 1973 Roe decision, the Court built that decision on the premise of the right of privacy enunciated in Griswold.
Of course, everyone knows two things — one, that there is nothing in the Constitution that would prevent Connecticut, or any other state, from banning contraception, and two, that there is almost no support in Connecticut or any other state to enact such a law today. It is even doubtful that many states would even ban same-sex marriage now, even if Obergefell were reversed. What Goldberg is doing is using the progressive playbook to cloud the issue: States can regulate abortion, including banning it, and the Court was in error in telling them that they could not.
This is because the United States is a federal system of government, not a unitary system of government. The 10th Amendment only reiterated what was well understood when the Constitution was sent to the states in 1787 and ratified in 1789: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people.”
This does not mean that Thomas agrees with everything a state does or does not do, any more than he agrees with all the federal government does. He has explained before that just because a law is stupid, does not mean that it is unconstitutional. Because of this, his opinion of contraception or same-sex marriage is irrelevant as to how he would rule as a judge, as it is not his role to make law, but rather to interpret and apply it.
Goldberg clearly does not hold the Constitution in high regard, as does Thomas. She demonstrated tremendous ignorance of it with her statement that Thomas might go back to “being a quarter of a person.” Evidently, she is referring to the “Three-fifths Clause” of the Constitution, in which three-fifths of slaves were to be counted for determining how many members a state would get to elect to the House of Representatives.
The Three-fifths (not the One-Quarter Clause, as Goldberg evidently thinks it was) Compromise was put into the Constitution to keep states, such as Virginia, from being able to count all of their slaves for representation purposes. The southern states, which had more slaves, wanted all of the slaves counted, while the northern states wanted no slaves counted. Thus, they compromised at three-fifths, not Goldberg’s one-fourth. Free blacks were counted the same as whites, whether they lived in the North or the South.
Deep down, however, left-wingers such as Goldberg, whether white or black, or whatever, find the thought of a conservative constitutionalist black person particularly galling. This is because they know that without the nearly 90-percent vote of blacks for the Democratic Party, they could not win a national election. If, for example, just a quarter of black voters cast their ballots for the Republican Party, Democratic chances of winning would be nearly zero.
This is why black Americans (and to a lesser degree, Hispanic Americans and even women) who become prominent conservatives are to have their reputations destroyed. One has seen similar attacks on other well-known black conservatives such as Ben Carson, Herman Cain, Candace Owens, and Herschel Walker.
But Clarence Thomas is Enemy Number One to the Left. One can recall the vicious attacks on Thomas when he was nominated to the Supreme Court, attacks that continue to the present day. They also attack Thomas through his wife, as Goldberg did on The View this week. Ginni Thomas is a conservative activist in her own right. If she were a liberal wife of a liberal politician or judge, she would be lionized on the Left. But because she is a conservative, the Left thinks she should express no political opinion publicly.
While the Left uses race and sex as political weapons against conservatives, claiming to be open and tolerant, it is noteworthy that Goldberg quickly notes Thomas’ marriage to a white woman as a way to advance her progressive viewpoint.
Finally, Goldberg and others of her ideology miss an important point — either through ignorance, or through deliberate deception. The Constitution was not frozen in time when it was ratified in 1789. The Founders provided for a way to amend the Constitution. When she says, “We’re not in the Constitution,” when referring to African-Americans, she conveniently forgets the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, all written with black Americans in mind. The Constitution of the United States, for better or worse, is as it has been amended, not just what it was when it was initially ratified in 1789.
Nowhere in the Constitution, then or now, does it say that blacks were not people.
Instead of celebrating an amazing life that is Clarence Thomas, leftists such as Whoopi Goldberg prefer to castigate him because he does not share their leftist ideology.
