Whoopi Goldberg calls out Supreme Court justice Thomas: ‘You better hope they don’t come for you’
Clarence Thomas and Whoopi Goldberg (Images: Getty)
Whoopi Goldberg has called out Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, suggesting that the court could come for Black people’s rights next.
In an episode of the daytime chat show The View on Monday (27 June), Goldberg criticised Thomas for his concurring opinion, published alongside the decision to overturn Roe v Wade, in which he suggested the court should revisit the cases that guaranteed the rights to same-sex marriage and contraception.
“What’s next? Clarence Thomas is signalling they would like to get rid of contraception. Do you understand, sir?” she said. “No, because you don’t have to use it.”
“We [Black people] were not in the Constitution either,” Goldberg continued. “We were not even people. You better hope that they don’t come for you, Clarence, and say: ‘You should not be married to your wife,’ who happens to be white. Because they will move back.”
Many critics have pointed out that by Thomas’ logic in his concurring opinion, the ruling that established a constitutional right to interracial marriage should also be reviewed by the Supreme Court.
The justice, whose wife is white, has been accused of hypocrisy for neglecting to suggest this right should also be placed on the chopping block.
Thomas is married to American attorney and conservative activist Ginni Thomas, who, according to The Independent, previously asked two Republican lawmakers to help overturn the 2020 election defeat for Donald Trump.
Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife and conservative activist Virginia Thomas while he waits to speak at the Heritage Foundation (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Justice Thomas was one of the five Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v Wade.
In his concurring opinion, which has no legal standing, he wrote: “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedent, including Griswold [the bedrock of the right to contraception] , Lawrence [which ruled that ‘sodomy’ bans were unconstitutional], and Obergefell [which made same-sex marriage the law of the land] ”
Thomas was one of the four justices to vote against the Obergefell ruling.
The 73-year-old said at a legal conference on Friday, per Reuters that, as a society, “we are becoming addicted to wanting to particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like. We can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want”.
In 2018 Thomas wrote a 14-page tirade saying that gay rights are favoured over gun rights.
