Clarence Thomas even worse than I thought, and that's saying something.

[Pete Ross Junior]

Last edited Fri Jul 1, 2022, 09:38 AM - Edit history (1)

Clarence Thomas dissent says 'aborted children' were used to develop COVID-19 vaccines
Raw Story

The United States Supreme Court on Thursday denied a religious liberty challenge to New York health care workers who were fighting against the state's vaccine mandate -- but not without a dissent from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that claimed COVID-19 vaccines were developed using "aborted children."

...

However, even the Catholic Church, which maintains that abortion is a sin, does not believe there are legitimate religious objections to using the vaccines.

...

[dalton99a]

1. Lazy ignorant asshole repeats what he heard on Fox News

[Dustlawyer]

8. What his wife heard on Fox News.

[JHB]

14. What his wife fed to people going on Fox News

[pfitz59]

2. I've always known he was horrible

He hid behind Scalia for many years. With Fat Tony gone his ugliness is on full display.

[Tetrachloride]

3. All 6 need to be neutered

[agingdem]

4. Clarence and Ginni

the Big Edie/Little Edie (Grey Gardens) of Washington, DC...both insane in their own way...

[keep_left]

5. Yep. The Church endorses the vax under the principle of "double effect".

Pope Francis has been very clear that there is no Church objection to the Covid vaccine. Not to mention, the overly-scrupulous radtrads out there have options; I know at least one of the Covid vaccines has not been made with the use of "aborted" cell lines. Note that these cell lines (HEK and others) have been used in nearly every major advance in medicine since the '60s. So since these people have alternative vaccines, this is simply a case being made in bad faith.

Here's an example of a health care system that got serious about firing antivaxxers: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216873062#post13

[underpants]

6. HEK is also used by major food companies to test taste

Coca Cola
Surely Pepsi too
Coke and Pepsi own a lot of fast food chains too
Nestle
Kraft
Cadbury
Senomyx has used the HEK 293 cell line in its flavor research to function as the mouth’s taste receptor cells, allowing the company to test hundreds of substances. But these cells are not in any of the actual food products that consumers would find on the market. CBS News wrote about this in 2011:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/oct/23/facebook-posts/no-food-companies-are-not-selling-products-contain/

[Walleye]

7. Hillary said she went to law school with him and he was always grievance-ridden and resentful

She probably told us that when he was nominated but nobody ever listens to her

[In It to Win It]

9. You thought there was a little bit of sanity in Clarence Thomas?

[rurallib]

10. when I think that HW put him in the seat once occupied

by the great Thurgood Marshall it almost makes me puke.

[Ms. Toad]

11. The article not only mischaracterizes what he said,

it ignores the basis on which he dissented.

First - his dissent says nothing about how he would have decided the case - merely that he believed the court should hear it.

As to the basis of dissent, it is a refinement of the Smith argument (which I discussed here).

There were two categories of individuals who were not vaccinated: Those with medical exemptions and those with religious exemptions.
Those with medical exemptions were permitted to continue working - as long as they took certain precautions to protect others. Those who asserted religious exemptions were not permitted to continue to work - even if they took identical protectinos.

That distinction is what Thomas wanted to explore.

Generally - Smith - says that the state doesn't have to create religious exemptions to a generally applicable law which was not drafted to target the free exercise of religion. (In Smith - at issue was whether the state had to accommodate Smith's use of peyote in religious ceremonies in the face of a generally applicable law which prohibited the use of peyote.)

Last year the court decided that a law was not generally applicable:

if it prohibits religious conduct while permitting secular conduct that undermines the government’s asserted interests in a similar way.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21-1143_3f14.pdf

I haven't read that case (Fulton v. Philadelphia), and don't recall it off the top of my head - so I don't know how similar it was. But the argument here is that because NY created a secular exemption to vaccines (for medical reasons) but refused to accommodate religious beliefs in the same way, the law is not generally applicable. If it isn't generally applicable, then applying the law differently to those asserting religious beliefs than it does to those asserting secular beliefs, violates the free exercise of religion.

Whether the Catholic Church believes there are no legitimate religious objections to using the vaccines is completely irrelevant to the argument the petitioners made. The question is whether an exemption available for secular reasons can be barred when the asserted basis of the exemption is religious.

Note: This explanation is a legal one. It is not a statement of my belief, or even of how I think the case would be decided. It's just an explanation of the legal basis for the dissent - and how the question raised fits within prior case law.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

12. Hillary Clinton was a classmate of Thomas where thomas was a person of grievance

Link to tweet

[canetoad]

13. Is there a reason

For chosing to format the body of your post in italics? Accessibility wise, it's not the best choice.

[Pete Ross Junior]

15. Fixed.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

16. The Five Worst Supreme Court Justices In American History, Ranked

In the legal community, Thomas is considered to be one of the worst SCOTUS justices in history

Link to tweet

https://thinkprogress.org/the-five-worst-supreme-court-justices-in-american-history-ranked-f725000b59e8/

5) Justice Clarence Thomas

Justice Clarence Thomas is the only current member of the Supreme Court who has explicitly embraced the reasoning of Lochner Era decisions striking down nationwide child labor laws and making similar attacks on federal power. Indeed, under the logic Thomas first laid out in a concurring opinion in United States v. Lopez, the federal minimum wage, overtime rules, anti-discrimination protections for workers, and even the national ban on whites-only lunch counters are all unconstitutional.

Though Thomas’s views are rare today, they have, sadly, not been the least bit uncommon during the Supreme Court’s history. He makes this list because, frankly, he should know better than his predecessors. As I explain in Injustices, many of the justices who resisted progressive legislation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were, like Field, motivated by ideology. Many others, however, were motivated by fear of the rapid changes state and federal lawmakers implemented in the wake of the even more rapid changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. It was possible to believe, in a world where factories, railroads, and the laws required to regulate factories and railroads were all very new things, that these laws would, as Herbert Hoover once said about the New Deal, “destroy the very foundations of our American system” by extending “government into our economic and social life.”

But Thomas has the benefit of eighty years of American history that Hoover had not witnessed when he warned of an overreaching government. In that time, the Supreme Court largely abandoned the values embraced by Justice Field, and the United States became the mightiest nation in the history of politics and the wealthiest nation in the history of money.