Actor and social justice activiest George Takei slammed Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during an interview with Fox 10 this week in Phoenix.

With his longtime partner and husband by his side, Takei slammed Justice Thomas for his dissenting opinion to last week’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, telling Fox 10:

He is a clown in blackface sitting on the Supreme Court. He gets me that angry.

Takei also mentioned rape scenes from the movie “12 Years a Slave,” reflecting on Justice Thomas: “And he says they had dignity as slaves?”

Takei went on to state:

My parents lost everything that they worked for in the middle of their lives in their thirties. My father’s business, our home, our freedom. And we’re supposed to call that dignified?
 
This man does not belong on the Supreme Court. He is an embarrassment. He is a disgrace to America.

Takei also published a scathing op-ed piece on MSNBC reflection on Thomas’ dissent in which the justice wrote about the origins of human dignity and inherent worth:

That vision is the foundation upon which this Nation was built. The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved.
 
Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.

Takei responded that:

As one of the survivors of the Japanese American internment, I feel compelled to respond.
 
I was only a child when soldiers with bayonetted rifles marched up our driveway in Los Angeles, banged on our door, and ordered us out. I remember my mothers’ tears as we gathered what little we could carry, and then were sent to live for many weeks in a single cramped horse stall at the Santa Anita racetracks. Our bank accounts were frozen, our businesses shuttered, and our homes with most of our belongings were left behind, all because we happened to look like the people who had bombed Pearl Harbor. […]

To say that the government does not bestow or grant dignity does not mean it cannot succeed in stripping it away through the imposition of unequal laws and deprivation of due process. At the very least, the government must treat all its subjects with equal human dignity. To deny a group the rights and privileges of others, based solely on an immutable characteristic such as race – or as in Obergefell, sexual orientation – is to strip them of human dignity and of the liberty to live as others live.

Takei also took Thomas to task for his own marriage in the context of the changing legal context of the last century:

It seems odd that Justice Thomas, as an African American, would be an opponent of marriage equality. His own current marriage, if he had sought to have it some fifty years ago, would have been illegal under then-existing anti-miscegenation laws. I cannot help but wonder if Justice Thomas would have felt any loss of dignity had the clerk’s office doors been shut in his face, simply because he was of a different race than his fiancée. It is a sad irony that he now enjoys the dignity of his marriage, equal in the eyes of the law to any others, while in the same breath proclaiming that the denial of marriage to LGBTs works no indignity.

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Samuel Warde

Samuel is a writer, social activist, and all-around troublemaker.

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