Clarence Thomas: An All-Time Slimeball

Here in the United States, when a justice is chosen for the Supreme Court, that is a lifetime appointment, only ending on their death or retirement. This is something that was designed to protect the Supreme Court justices from the pressure of re-election or removal and replacement under different administrations. Following that reasoning, it does make a certain amount of sense, in theory. In practice, however, justices’ lifetime appointments create a strange power struggle that, if justices don’t retire at politically convenient times, basically leaves the entire political leanings of the Supreme Court up to which President’s term people end up dying in. It also means that if some awful, sour milk spill of a human gets appointed, we have to stare at their dumb face deciding what our rights are forever. Like Clarence Thomas.

See, you’d think that with something like a lifetime appointment on the line, the process of that appointment would be thorough, dedicated, and not, you know, a complete farce in service of a foregone conclusion. The truth is that votes are counted long before anybody has to sit in a chair and talk about their Deep Respect For The Law on C-SPAN. By the time any nominee receives their tiny little water bottle to sip between questions, they already know that, unless they suddenly reveal that their walls are filled with the chopped up limbs of unlucky hitchhikers, they’re going to be a Supreme Court Justice.

We got a taste of this more recently with the poster-boy for barely contained, deep internal rage, Brett Kavanaugh. He went through his hearings with all the aplomb of a man screaming at his wife in an airport Chili’s, but it didn’t matter, because it never did. It was nothing more than a reason for lawmakers that want to enhance the realism of their human suits to pretend to hem and haw and say something is “deeply concerning” before voting exactly the way they told the whip they would.

Clarence Thomas, though, was a bit of a trailblazer, in that he laid the groundwork for Kavanaugh to be confirmed despite accusations of sexual violence, on the back of his confirmation despite accusations against him of sexual harassment by Anita Hill. This was back in 1991, where workplace sexual harassment was basically considered a good way to blow off steam. Even so, Anita Hill’s allegations that Clarence Thomas had repeatedly been sexually inappropriate with her while she was his subordinate, doing just normal cool work stuff like describing his own “anatomy” a.k.a., probably not his knee, and telling her about porn he’d watched where women have sex with animals. But sure, it’s gay sex that’s unnatural. 

As you’d expect, Hill was pretty much put in the stocks and then roundly ignored. There were other women that had similar stories about Thomas, but their testimony was deemed unnecessary through a deal between Republicans and the head of the Judiciary Committee, some guy named Joe Biden. Wonder what he’s up to. Anyways, hems and haws were hemmed and hawed and then everything happened exactly as everyone knew it would, and we were stuck with the bigoted gargoyle that is Clarence Thomas staring down from the Supreme Court bench until the hate that drives his bones finally burns out.

Thomas is in the news lately as a result of the stupefying reversal of Roe v. Wade. Overturning Roe v. Wade is something that’s been a pet project of his for his entire stint on the court, if by pet you mean some sort of horrific demon lunging at the eyes of anyone unlucky enough to look at it. See, on a Supreme Court that’s now chock-full of conservatives, Clarence Thomas is the most conservative of them all. He’s the kind of conservative that feels less like any sort of political belief and more like just a deep enduring desire for revenge on humankind for imagined slights. He is the judicial equivalent of a sweaty preacher screaming about fire and brimstone loud enough to coat the front pews in fine spittle.

His opinion on the overturning of Roe v. Wade contains some terrifying suggestions that, despite their formal language, bleed through with the glee of a man that probably claps when a cat gets hit by a car. Thomas mentions three cases in particular that he apparently has his dead little eyes set on overturning, I assume because the levels of despair overturning them would cause is something he is able to feed on like some sort of emotional vampire. Those three cases are Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges.

Obergefell is the one most likely to be familiar to a layman, and the most recent. It’s the court decision that made gay marriage legal, which is SO much more recent than we like to pretend every time Bud Light prints off rainbow labels for Pride Month. Even though supporting gay marriage is now a generally accepted and popular idea, which you can tell because Democrats are finally ok with supporting it on the record, it’s certainly something that isn’t difficult to imagine an opponent of. 

Lawrence v. Texas, on the other hand, is a little wilder. See, Lawrence is a case that is centered around… sodomy laws. Funky butt lovin’, as the children say. The first sign that this case should be ancient history is that it uses the word “sodomy” which is basically completely absent from modern vocabulary outside of the kind of splinter churches where they roll around on the ground with snakes. Clarence Thomas' synapses are genuinely sparking, in the year 2022, for the purpose of writing, “we should work on making buttsex illegal again.”

And Griswold v. Connecticut? Yeah, that’s the case that says married couples have a legal right to purchase contraception. That is the level of crusty asshole Clarence Thomas is. To him, a pack of birth control pills in the nightstand of a middle-aged married woman is a breakdown in moral society. Look, homosexuality is unfortunately a hot political topic, but I think most people are on board with jimmyhats nowadays. That’s not even really a conservative belief? It’s the belief of like, one of the older dead popes.

Like we discussed up top, lifetime appointment. So, until Thomas gets a mouthful of poorly seasoned steak stuck in his throat and passes out on his kitchen table while his wife is off planning insurrections, we have to look at his nasty ghoul face. People are going to space for fun and we’re still at the whims of a guy who likes to talk over lunch about bestiality porn but also thinks condoms should maybe be illegal.

Top Image: Public Domain/Pixabay