This is why Clarence Thomas scares me
I don’t want to downplay the whole Anita Hill thing, but honestly it shouldn’t have had to get that far for people to say he wasn’t a good choice for the highest court of the land. In my opinion, there were so many reasons directly related to his actual job performance before that to disqualify him from serving.
Now we are reaping what we have sown:
Justice Thomas, who hasn’t spoken during a court argument in five years, supported the California bill for a different reason—because early American Puritan society placed the father in total control of a family and anyone wishing to speak to a child had to go through him. Thomas’ entire dissent is a long list of early American source material. Part of the father’s absolute power was the right and duty “to fill his children’s minds with knowledge and… make them apply their knowledge in right action.” [cit. omitted] Puritans thought children were “innately sinful and that parents’ primary task was to suppress their children’s natural depravity.” [cit. omitted]. Accordingly, parents were not to let their children read “vain Books, profane Ballads, and filthy Songs” or “fond and amorous Romances, … fabulous Histories of Giants, the bombast Achievements of Knight Errantry, and the like.” It goes on like this for some time. “In the Puritan tradition common in the New England Colonies, fathers ruled families with absolute authority,” Thomas notes. “In the Massachusetts Colony, for example, it was unlawful for tavern keepers (or anyone else) to entertain children without their parents’ consent.” This matters because “the Constitution is a written instrument” and “‘its meaning does not alter.’” Thomas’ well-known originalism thus leads him to say that attitudes toward parenting in the 1600s and 1700s are crucial to understanding the limits of “free speech.” “It would be absurd to suggest that such a society understood ‘the freedom of speech’ to include a right to speak to minors (or a corresponding right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents,” he wrote. “The founding generation would not have considered it an abridgment of ‘the freedom of speech’ to support parental authority by restricting speech that bypasses minors’ parents.” Therefore, such restrictions of sales directly to minors don’t violate the First Amendment.
This chain of reasoning shouldn’t even be a factor in a legal discussion.
We don’t often talk about who will be remembered as the worst justice of the supreme court, but I know who I am voting for…
(Source: Ars Technica)
