"...Now Justice Thomas, a Catholic himself, is free to believe that he owes nothing of his dignity to his status as a free and equal citizen of the United States, but our whole history and body of law screams the exact opposite. The greatest and most radical achievement of our revolution, as Tocqueville along with the framers themselves understood, was to create a society without distinctions of rank, in which all were equal before the law. The abolitionist movement based itself upon that principle as well and it was embodied in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments after the civil war. The twentieth century has extended full legal dignity to women. Under Franklin Roosevelt's leadership, we fought the Second World War to make four fundamental freedoms safe in the world at large. It seems that Clarence Thomas, had he been an adult living in 1776, would have been a Tory, complaining that the Continental Congress had opened a revolution against an earthly authority whose doings should not unduly trouble any of God's creatures. Fortunately for the United States and the world, those views, while present in the revolutionary era, did not prevail..."
I don't know about all of this.....
I rather doubt that J. Thomas, in 1776, would have sounded like a 1776 colonial Tory.
No comments:
Post a Comment