SCOTUS's decision is a victory for women in Texas and across America. Safe abortion should be a right—not just on paper, but in reality. -Hand
This fight isn't over: The next president has to protect women's health. Women won't be "punished" for exercising their basic rights. -HRead more here.
And he will suffer absolutely no consequences.
George Takei went on a racist rant Monday in an interview in Phoenix, unleashing on conservative Justice Clarence Thomas in response to Thomas’ comments regarding the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, NewsBusters reported.
“He is a clown in blackface sitting on the Supreme Court. He gets me that angry. He doesn’t belong there,” Takei said, later adding, “This man does not belong on the Supreme Court. He is an embarrassment. He is a disgrace to America. I’ll say it on camera.”
Takei’s rage came in light of the Justice’s contrary stance on the recent equal marriage decision, where the Court ruled 5-4 that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage. Thomas released a statement saying that the government does not grant human dignity, and as such cannot take it away. Thomas argued that human dignity is inherent, and that the Supreme Court cannot issue it.
As for Takei’s “blackface” remark, liberals seem pretty pleased by it.
In the matter of the so-called Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court ruled that the law must not say what it in fact does say because it would be better if it were not to say what it says and were to say something else instead. In the matter of same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court rules that the law must say what it does not say because it would be better if it were to say what it does not say instead of what it says. Which is to say, the Supreme Court has firmly established that it does not matter what the law says or does not say — what matters is what they want.Read more here.
That texts may be imaginatively interpreted to any end is not news — “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” as William Shakespeare observed in The Merchant of Venice. The legendary constitutional scholar Barack Obama failed to notice, until the day before yesterday, that the Constitution mandates the legalization of homosexual marriage from sea to shining sea, but, to be fair, that is an easy provision to overlook, even for a mind as keen as Barack Obama’s, since the Constitution does not say one word about marriage, much less about the state-level codification of homosexual couplings being a fundamental federal right.
Constitutional torture is an art, and Chief Justice John Roberts has emerged as its Andy Warhol: an impresario who will put his name on anything.
It is uncomfortable to think about, but our Supreme Court functions in much the same way as Iran’s Guardian Council: It is a supralegislative body of purported scholars, distinguished by ceremonial black robes, that imaginatively applies ancient doctrines “conscious of the present needs and the issues of the day,” as the ayatollahs over there and over here both put it, deciding — discovering! — what is mandatory and what is forbidden as the shifting currents of politics dictate. The main difference is that the Iranians take their sharia rather more seriously than we take our constitutional law: John Roberts’s opinion in Burwell wasn’t just wrong — wrong can be forgiven — it was embarrassing, craven, and intellectually indefensible. Antonin Scalia was right to let him have it with both barrels, but he’d do better to resign from the Supreme Court — it is difficult to see how an honorable man could be associated with it.
...the idea that lurking in the penumbras of our 18th-century Constitution is a fundamental national right to gay marriage is simply preposterous. It is not there. It is a fiction, and, just like the Harry Potter novels, the fact that it is very, very popular does not mean that it is not fiction.
That the chief justice went one way on health care and another on marriage tells us nothing at all about the law or the Constitution: It tells us about John Roberts. And that is the problem. Asked what he thought about Western civilization, Mohandas K. Gandhi supposedly quipped that he thought it would be a good idea. Conservatives, if we’re being honest, might say the same about the rule of law. It would be a good idea, at least an interesting experiment. For the moment, though, there’s only power, the men who have it, and the things they do with it.
