Clarence Thomas annoyed with this whole ‘rights’ dealie

Corny 80's Pic via Wikipedia

At a Q & A for high-school essay contest winners covered by the NY Times, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas let his guard down, and now I kinda want him to go ahead and put it back up.  I’d really rather not be aware of some of the Justice’s views and feelings.  It makes it hard to sleep at night.  Thomas on nostalgia for days gone by:

“How can you not reminisce about a childhood where you began each day with the Pledge of Allegiance as little kids lined up in the schoolyard and then marched in two by two with a flag and a crucifix in each classroom?” 

Besides the creepy mental picture of a flag and crucifix together, and all the images of church making out with state that it implies, I’m a little put off by a black man pining for those good old days of the 1950s.  It wasn’t exactly the stuff of Norman Rockwell for minorities, from what I’ve read.  But as an affirmative action conservative, cognitive dissonance is nothing new to Thomas.  And that’s not the half – the really good stuff comes when he broaches the topic of the evening.  The event was hosted by the Bill of Rights Institute, but as the NY Times put it, “Justice Thomas did not embrace the document, and he proposed a couple of alternatives”.  Oh dear.  

‘Today there is much focus on our rights,” Justice Thomas said. “Indeed, I think there is a proliferation of rights.”

“I am often surprised by the virtual nobility that seems to be accorded those with grievances,” he said. “Shouldn’t there at least be equal time for our Bill of Obligations and our Bill of Responsibilities?”

We do give equal time to those bills, Clarence – except we call them the tax and penal codes.  We can change the name if you’d like, so long as you promise not to lay a hand on that silly Bill of Rights you seem to hold in utter contempt.  Apparently, concepts like free speech and habeas corpus are mere “grievances”, the whining of a privileged populace spoiled from the nanny state’s soft touch.  Jeez.  If I didn’t know better, I’d believe he got his idea of the Constitution from this Simpsons School of Rock parody.

“There’s a lot of flag burners who have got too much freedom,
I wanna make it legal for policemen to beat ‘em”

 
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