Actor Samuel Jackson criticized Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as “Uncle Clarence” for jeopardizing the legal right to interracial marriage with the court’s decision Friday to annul Roe v. Wade.
The same rationale that the conservative court used to overturn the 1973 decision on abortion rights can now be used to enforce the same-sex marriage, contraception, and interracial marriage rights protected in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling. , abolish it, legislators and scholars fear. †
Jackson taunted Thomas as “Uncle Clarence” in a Friday night tweet, referring to the extraordinarily servile Black character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s pre-Civil War novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”.
The Roe decision suggested that the legal basis for constitutional protections for abortion was weak based on arguments supporting other Supreme Court cases guaranteeing various rights, including the right to contraception and same-sex and interracial marriage.
In a solo competing opinion on Friday, Thomas suggested the court should “correct the error” by revoking granted rights now protected under the “substantial due process clause” of the 14th Amendment.
But Thomas specifically only mentioned the rights to same-sex marriage and contraception. He evaded the case of Loving, who, if Roe was quashed, could threaten his own interracial marriage to Ginni Thomas.
Jim Obergefell, the prosecutor behind the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, said Friday that Thomas had left Loving v. Virginia off his list of top court decisions to “reconsider” because it “touches him personally†
That “concerns him personally, but he doesn’t care about the LGBTQ+ community,” says Obergefell said on MSNBCs “The Reid Out.”
While some Thomas supporters criticized Jackson for what they called a “racist” attack on justice, the actor’s Twitter followers mostly applauded the dig — and the issue:
More on the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling:
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
