When the court destroyed a human right that had been a central part of U.S. law for almost 50 years, that wasn’t enough for Justice Clarence Thomas. In his concurrence with the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, an eager Thomas also expressed his desire to get this rogue Court’s hooks into the Griswold v. Connecticut, Obergefell v. Hodges, and Lawrence v. Texas decisions.
There’s absolutely no doubt that an equally thirsty Republican attorney general will soon feed Thomas an opportunity to reverse one or all of those decisions. And considering the radical nature of this Court, there’s a good chance that these cases will get heard. America will get the thrill of watching attorneys forced to relitigate the right to buy contraceptives, the legality of gay marriage, and whether states can enact laws that make being anything but heterosexual punishable as a crime. They clearly have one vote on all of the above.
Still, as MSNBCreports, there was one case this year where the extremist Court fell one vote short of granting a hearing. That case involved the 117-year-old ruling in which vaccine mandates were declared lawful. In the middle of a pandemic that has cost over a million American lives, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas were all ready to slap down mandates. But Thomas' justification for taking the case was extra-special because it was based on a conspiracy theory long-debunked before he ever wrote his opinion.
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To be specific, Ginni’s husband didn’t go with anything like a claim that the government doesn’t have the right to intrude into personal health care decisions. What he went with this, the religious rights of the defendants were being threatened by “all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.”
None of the available vaccines contain any human cells at all. The vaccines were not made from human cells, grown in human cells, developed from human cells, or derived from human cells, aborted or otherwise. Early in the process of testing the vaccines, before they were given to any human subjects, both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were tested against cultures of replicated human cells from lines that go back decades—that’s a safety test also true of every vaccine, and almost every drug, released for human use.
When this objection was debunked, right-wing sources rushed to say that it wasn’t Thomas making this claim, but the defendants. Except what the defendants wrote in their challenge was much milder. The original complaint argued that vaccines may have used “abortion-derived fetal cell lines in testing, development, or production.” It was Thomas who turned this into “all available COVID–19 vaccines … were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.”
Thomas didn’t just argue the Court should take the case, he upped the ante, making a charge the defendants never made. Which doesn’t leave much doubt about how Thomas would have voted should just one more Justice joined in to allow the case to come forward.
In the cases he has asked Republicans to bring him, Thomas has served up an attack on the whole concept that Americans have any right to expect privacy in their own homes or their own bedrooms. He is explicitly saying that the state has the right to determine who is allowed to have sex and how they are allowed to have it, right down to the positions. He’s saying that the right to marry whoever you please is a mistake that must be addressed. He’s saying that the state can remove access to contraceptives for everyone, including—even especially—married couples.
Thomas is seriously advocating a return to the time when the government could smash their way into someone’s bedroom and charge them with a criminal act for who or how they were having sex, or for trying to prevent that sex from resulting in a pregnancy. Those cases will come to the Court with his guaranteed vote already in their corner, and with helpful notes on how to win over the handful of radical right votes that they need. Because he’s already demonstrated that he’s not just eager to see hear these cases, Thomas is ready to argue them.