By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, July 07, 2015
Who knew that inherent rights are a political bombshell?
Justice Clarence Thomas set off a controversy in his
dissent in the Supreme Court’s gay-marriage decision by reciting core American
beliefs about the innate dignity and rights of all persons, whatever their
circumstances or the injustices done to them. He wrote that even people held in
slavery, even people interned during World War II, retained their dignity
because it is impossible to erase what is woven into our very nature.
What one would think is a stirring statement about our
irreducible human quality occasioned outrage among the justice’s critics. Slate
considered the passage “brutal.” MSNBC found it “jaw dropping.” Salon called it
“vile.” But none could top the gay actor and activist George Takei — famous as
Sulu in “Star Trek” — who fumed that Thomas had forfeited his status as a black
man.
Seriously. In a TV interview, Takei called Thomas “a
clown in blackface.” Amid a backlash over this insult, he doubled down: “I feel
Justice Thomas has abdicated and abandoned his African-American heritage by
claiming slavery did not strip dignity from human beings.” Takei the would-be
racial arbiter eventually apologized, although he still thinks Thomas is
“deeply wrong.”
That Takei’s first instinct was to deny the blackness of
Clarence Thomas tells us much about the rancid racial essentialism of the Left,
which can’t get its head around minorities stepping out of ideological line.
That aside, the Left’s freakout is remarkable, since what
Thomas wrote represents American Founding 101. Where did Thomas get this
outlandish notion of rights and dignity that exist prior to government?
Maybe Thomas Jefferson? “We do not claim these,” he wrote
of our natural rights, “under the charters of kings or legislators, but under
the King of kings.” Or John Adams? He wrote of rights “antecedent to all
earthly government,” “that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws,”
“derived from the great Legislator of the universe.”
One wonders if anyone disturbed by the Thomas dissent
glanced at the Declaration of Independence over the July 4th weekend. It says,
as Thomas notes, all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights.” In case there’s any misunderstanding, the good folks at
Merriam-Webster define unalienable as “impossible to take away or give up.”
This is a truth that abolitionists wielded against the
institution of slavery. The foremost of them, Frederick Douglass, held it
strongly. He declared once after suffering a rank act of discrimination: “They
cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can
degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment,
but those who are inflicting it upon me.” (Quick — someone ask George Takei if
Frederick Douglass was truly black.)
The reaction to the Thomas dissent is, in part, about the
historical and philosophical illiteracy of his critics. But they also have a
profoundly different worldview. The Founders believed we have innate rights
that must be protected from government. As Thomas writes, “Our Constitution —
like the Declaration of Independence before it — was predicated on a simple
truth: One’s liberty, not to mention one’s dignity, was something to be
shielded from — not provided by — the State.”
This notion is anathema to a Left that identifies the
state with progress, and that defines freedom much more loosely (not to say
nonsensically) as including what government gives us, in an ever-expanding
palette of benefits.
Thomas is the one firmly grounded in the best of the
American tradition, even if his clueless attackers don’t get it. Some of them
acted as if he is somehow ignorant of the nature of slavery, even though his
forebears were slaves and he grew up in abject poverty in the Jim Crow South.
Justice Thomas doesn’t just understand more about the reality of racial
discrimination than his critics, but more about America and its ideals.
They should keep reading his opinions. Maybe they will
learn something.
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