Andrew McDonald, a senior associate justice on the Connecticut Supreme Court, is calling out U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for what he calls hypocrisy.
Last week, Thomas wrote a concurring opinion to SCOTUS’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade in which he suggested that the court should reconsider previous decisions including Obergefell v. Hodges, the case which established the constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
Related: Clarence Thomas wants to let anti-LGBTQ church sue because they were called a “hate group”
“Mr. Justice Thomas had much to say today about my loving marriage. Oddly he didn’t have much to say about his ‘Loving’ marriage,” McDonald wrote in a Facebook post, referring to Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court ruling that overturned state bans on interracial marriage in the U.S.
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Thomas, who is Black, got married to his wife Ginni, who is white, in Virginia in 1987, the state that the was the subject of the 1967 Supreme Court decision on interracial marriage.
In his opinion, Thomas wrote that “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’… we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.’”
Along with Obergefell, he suggested that the court reconsider Lawrence v. Texas, which deemed anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional; and Griswold v. Connecticut, which established married couples’ right to buy and use contraceptives. Like Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell, the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia was decided in part based on the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.
McDonald is not the first to question Thomas’s omission of Loving from this list. Last week, Jim Obergefell himself released a statement saying, “The millions of loving couples who have the right to marriage equality to form their own families do not need Clarence Thomas imposing his individual twisted morality upon them. If you want to see an error in judgment, Clarence Thomas, look in the mirror.”
On Friday, Obergefell appeared on MSNBC’s The Reid Out, and suggested that Thomas didn’t mention Loving because it affects him personally.
“I’m just concerned that hundreds of 1000s of marriages across this nation are at risk and the ability of people across this nation to marry the person they love is at risk,” Obergefell said. “And for Justice Thomas to completely omit Loving v. Virginia, in my mind, is quite telling.”
