Clarence Thomas's Distorted View of Progressivism

Clarence Thomas described judging as a process of stripping away personal agendas and ideologies, likening it to a runner preparing to eliminate distractions. He later delivered a lecture marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, presenting its “certain unalienable rights” as bestowed by God and portraying government as existing to implement those rights. In his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, he criticized the majority for rejecting the Declaration’s idea that human dignity is innate. He suggested that the Court’s approach undermines the Declaration’s foundational principles. Thomas’s long tenure on the Supreme Court has continued alongside these themes about rights, dignity, and the proper role of government.

"Taking the bench means “having to strip down, like a runner, to eliminate agendas, to eliminate ideologies,” Thomas said. “It is an amazing process, because that is precisely what you start doing. You start putting the speeches away, you start putting the policy statements away.” Earlier this month, the seventy-seven-year-old Thomas became the second-longest-serving Justice in history, surpassing John Paul Stevens, who retired after thirty-four years, in 2010."

"A few weeks before eclipsing Stevens's record, he delivered a revealing-and, to many who heard it, unsettling and ahistorical-lecture on what should have been an uncontroversial topic: the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Speaking at the University of Texas at Austin, at the invitation of its new School of Civic Leadership, part of a wave of conservative-inflected entities being created at public universities in Republican states, Thomas sounded themes that have been woven through his jurisprudence."

"Thomas sounded themes that have been woven through his jurisprudence: that God bestowed the “certain unalienable rights” of the Declaration, and that government serves merely to implement them. Dissenting in the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, which found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Thomas complained that the majority “rejects the idea-captured in our Declaration of Independence-that human dignity is innate and suggests instead t"

Read at The New Yorker