Clarence Thomas Has Entered His Angry Transphobic Blogger Phase
Once again, we have an honest-to-God Supreme Court justice railing against the scourge of allowing "elite sentiment to distort and stifle democratic debate."
Even in Chief Justice John Roberts-adjusted terms, Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion in United States v. Skrmetti, which the Supreme Court decided on Wednesday, is embarrassing, incoherent dogshit: 24 agonizing pages attempting to explain why a law that explicitly bans gender-affirming healthcare based on a patient’s sex does not discriminate on the basis of sex. It is the rare majority opinion that reads, both in substance and tone, like one of Brett Kavanaugh’s solo concurrences, which I do not mean as a compliment.
Fortunately for people who do not like reading bad writing from dumb guys, Kavanaugh did not write a concurrence, but Justice Clarence Thomas did. And even in Thomas-adjusted terms, it is one of the most demented opinions I have read of late—a conspiratorial, Charlie Kelly-esque jumble of transphobic innuendo, inscrutable to anyone without a deep familiarity with the collected works of your least favorite reactionary centrist blogger. It is a culture-war bingo card masquerading as constitutional analysis, because for Clarence Thomas, there is nothing more offensive than the notion that any perspectives matter other than his own.
Thomas spends the first few pages arguing that the Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock, in which the Court extended Title VII’s (statutory) protections against sex discrimination to LGBTQ people, should not apply in the (constitutional) equal protection context. But this is the only aspect of the opinion that deals with “law” in any meaningful sense. From there, Thomas moves on to generally attacking the credibility of “so-called,” “alleged,” and “self-proclaimed” experts in the medical community—experts who, as Thomas notes with disdain, “overwhelmingly agree” that the treatments implicated by the ban in Skrmetti can be “medically necessary.”
Thomas’s ostensible point is that scientific expertise is not relevant to the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause. But to make it, he focuses almost entirely on substance, trying to show that, in his Wikipedia University Medical School-educated opinion, the experts are wrong on the merits. He criticizes the dissent for providing “sanitized descriptions” of the medical treatments at issue, continuing his long, proud tradition of substituting titillating language for legal argument. He cites some of The New York Times’s more transphobic coverage of late, and to the Cass Review, a UK report on trans healthcare for teens that experts have deemed (and this is a technical term) hot garbage. He mournfully invokes the experiences of “detransitioners,” a word that invariably precedes some of the most egregious sophistry you will ever encounter.
And of course, Thomas lashes out at “the Biden administration” for ostensibly having “pressed” the World Professional Association for Transgender Health on a policy issue in 2022. The clear implication is that the organization’s recommendations are hopelessly tainted by ideology—a trap to which Clarence Thomas, of course, would never fall victim.
Considering the relevance of medical expertise is bad, Thomas concludes, because it allows “elite sentiment to distort and stifle democratic debate under the guise of scientific judgment.” As always, the fact that instead granting unelected, unaccountable Supreme Court justices the unreviewable authority to decide policy questions also allows “elite sentiment to distort and stifle democratic debate” seems not to have occurred to him.
I’ve written before about how Supreme Court justices (like anyone else) evolve politically as they age, which, in legal media, usually operates to obfuscate the rightward drift of “moderate” conservatives like Anthony Kennedy or Sanda Day O’Connor. From the moment of his confirmation, though, Thomas was already about as conservative as Supreme Court justices get. More than three decades later, opinions like his Skrmetti concurrence serve as reminders that we have never really dealt with the implications of a Republican justice whose brain is steeped less in Fox News talking points than OANN-style agitprop.
He didn’t get his way in Skrmetti, but on this Court, Thomas concurrences have a funny way of becoming majority opinions over time. In the meantime, he will keep approaching culture war cases in the same way: fully convinced that he is the only thing standing in the way of the woke agenda’s horrifying triumph.
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When Uncle Thomas departs this mortal coil, pray it is during a Dem Administration. Oh, and please take Beer Boy with you, and Sammy the Bullshitter, too.
Clarence Thomas has a stick up his ass.