Apparently affirmative action beneficiary/Uncle Tom/bigoted conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t as dumb as the bile on the left assert that he is- at least that is how the New Republic’s Jeffrey Rosen sees it:
Next to the hyperbole of Kennedy and Scalia, the most convincing opinions in Lawrence were the most modest. In the same way that O’Connor offered the case for striking down the Texas law in the narrowest possible terms, so Justice Thomas gave us a dissent of eloquent simplicity. “The law before the Court today “is … uncommonly silly,” he said, quoting Justice Stewart’s dissent in the contraceptives case. “If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it.” Nevertheless, Thomas said he was unable to find in the Constitution a “general right of privacy,” or, as the Court called it “the liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.” The fact that the majority didn’t bother to respond to Thomas shows how little the judicial activists on the left and the right have learned from the errors of Roe. Their lack of self discipline will only fan the flames of the confirmation battles to come, whether they occur this week, next year, or in the years to come.
M. Scott Eiland
Andrew Sullivan admitted that he didn’t recognize the reference to Stewart’s Griswold dissent, and that he had found the “silly” comment rather condescending. To his everlasting credit, he acknowledged that the reference had simply gone over his head and the heads of some other commentators. Rather more classy than the performance of a certain racist bimbo at the NYT.