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In Clarence Thomas's gun rights opinion, race plays a major role (Courtland Milloy moonbat alert!)
Washington Post ^ | June 30, 2010 | Courtland Milloy

Posted on 06/30/2010 5:04:01 PM PDT by neverdem

He hardly ever speaks during oral arguments, often appearing asleep on the bench. But in his written opinion Monday supporting the right to bear arms, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas roared to life.

Referring to the disarming of blacks during the post-Reconstruction era, Thomas wrote: "It was the 'duty' of white citizen 'patrols to search negro houses and other suspected places for firearms.' If they found any firearms, the patrols were to take the offending slave or free black 'to the nearest justice of the peace' whereupon...'"

--snip--

Thomas made no mention of the black loss of life and liberty from handguns being wielded by other blacks. But he has made clear on other occasions that the problem is not that there are too many guns in the black community; the problem is too many criminals.

He dismissed the cogent gun-control arguments of his retiring colleague, John Paul Stevens, conjuring up the abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens instead: "When it was first proposed to free the slaves and arm the blacks, did not half the nation tremble?"

Let 'em quake, Thomas appears to be saying.

From Frederick Douglass, Thomas writes: " 'The black man has never had the right either to keep or bear arms,' and that, until he does, 'the work of the Abolitionists was not finished.' "

Because of his conservative take on affirmative action and prisoners' rights, he has been cast as an uncouth African American who didn't understand black history, a dupe for arch conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and a man who couldn't think for himself.

What Thomas has created, however, is a legal defense of the Second Amendment so thoroughly original and starkly race-based that none of the white justices would even acknowledge it, as if it were some blank sheet crafted by an invisible man...

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Editorial; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: banglist; clarencethomas; mcdonald; thomas
OTIS M c DONALD, et al., PETITIONERS v. CITY OF CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, et al.

Thomas' opinion was a convincing argument to revive the Fourteenth Amendment ’s Privileges or Immunities Clause. I'm no lawyer, but Mark Levin called it brilliant. It makes more sense than due process.

Courtland Milloy is obviously obsessed by race.

1 posted on 06/30/2010 5:04:10 PM PDT by neverdem
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To: neverdem

FOR ALL LIBERALS - the following is recommended reading, as it will prevent acute Cranio-Rectal Inversion Syndrome (CRIS)afflicting you.

DISARM THE NEGROES: The Racist Roots of Georgia’s Gun Laws

Read carefully, and please use the 70 footnotes, lest you continue being a CRIS victim.

;-)


2 posted on 06/30/2010 5:23:57 PM PDT by GladesGuru (In a society predicated upon freedom, it is essential to examine principles,)
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To: neverdem

Milloy doesn’t know the first thing about the law, the Constitution, the 14th Amendment, or much of anything else. He was hired by the Post as the black columnist, after black readers protested the content of the paper.


3 posted on 06/30/2010 5:25:17 PM PDT by popdonnelly (Democrats = authoritarian socialists)
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To: neverdem

The 2nd is the last defense against tyranny by others, which is the point that Thomas was making.


4 posted on 06/30/2010 5:28:18 PM PDT by ikka
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To: neverdem
Thomas made no mention of the black loss of life and liberty from handguns being wielded by other blacks. But he has made clear on other occasions that the problem is not that there are too many guns in the black community; the problem is too many criminals.

Courtland, there is an obvious contradiction between these two assertions of yours.

5 posted on 06/30/2010 5:31:54 PM PDT by iowamark
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To: neverdem

Liberals will never openly discuss their desire to disarm minorities in this country.


6 posted on 06/30/2010 5:42:15 PM PDT by Erik Latranyi (Too many conservatives urge retreat when the war of politics doesn't go their way.)
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To: neverdem

There are a few conservatives who regularly cause liberal heads to explode. I enjoy the sight.


7 posted on 06/30/2010 5:46:02 PM PDT by Jacquerie (The law is reason unaffected by desire - Aristotle)
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To: ikka
The 2nd is the last defense against tyranny by others, which is the point that Thomas was making.

Maybe so, and maybe he was pointing out that these black people were denied their rights under the second and he was having no more of it.

8 posted on 06/30/2010 5:57:46 PM PDT by org.whodat
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To: neverdem

Very bizarre. The lefties told Justice Thomas that he wasn’t “really” black during the hearings and they have persisted ever since then to ridicule him and assert that he isn’t actually a black person, deep down inside.

Clarence Thomas is an individual human being, made in the image and likeness of God, and he knows it and this is why he is a Christian. But the press is waiting for the Democratic Party to tell them who is and is not a human being, and they obviously decided that their line was going to be that Justice Thomas was neither human nor black.

Strange that they should suddenly come out and portray him as a black agitator...


9 posted on 06/30/2010 6:06:31 PM PDT by livius
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To: neverdem
the author of the article also manages to miss the point of NY's Sullivan Laws, to keep guns out of the hands of the "uppity" Blacks.

Mark

10 posted on 06/30/2010 6:46:45 PM PDT by MarkL (Do I really look like a guy with a plan?)
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To: neverdem
Courtland Milloy may be some race-obsessed aging journalist for the Washington Post, but did anyone actually read the article he wrote in it's entirety?

It didn't read like a condemnation of Justice Thomas at all to me. I took away from Thomas' concurrence in McDonald the same picture that Courtland Malloy did, in addition to Thomas seeking to revive Privileges or Immunities in the 14th Amendment against the rotten Slaughterhouse decision.

Reading Thomas' concurrence, I was genuinely inspired. It's the best part of the whole decision. Our man Justice Thomas touched the finest points of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in language so proper for the occasion as to command the respect and consent from every honest reader. In fact, I was practically ready to shout 'Kill Whitey!' (from an historical perspective of a black sharecropper) before I got halfway through reading it.

Courtland Milloy writes "What Thomas has created, however, is a legal defense of the Second Amendment so thoroughly original and starkly race-based that none of the white justices would even acknowledge it, as if it were some blank sheet crafted by an invisible man." as if it were the racial content of his concurrence that drove Scalia, Alito, Kennedy, and Roberts away. Not so: I know that it was because of 'Privileges or Immunities' like a lot of court watchers, and in that regard I suppose I should mention this to Milloy if he wishes to revise or extend his remarks.

However, I still believe that Milloy does credit to Justice Thomas' reputation even on the racial aspect of Thomas' concurrence in McDonald because it's long past time that someone talked about where gun control laws originated: Taking guns away from black people.

Thankfully, Justice Thomas etched that forever in our nation's judicial history. Absolutely appropriate and damned well done.

11 posted on 06/30/2010 6:51:26 PM PDT by The KG9 Kid
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To: The KG9 Kid
Courtland Milloy may be some race-obsessed aging journalist for the Washington Post, but did anyone actually read the article he wrote in it's entirety?

If that's directed at me, of course I read it. How did you think I decided how I would excerpt it?

12 posted on 06/30/2010 7:07:58 PM PDT by neverdem (Xin loi minh oi)
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To: neverdem
Thomas' opinion was a convincing argument to revive the Fourteenth Amendment .....

Hmmm, weak reed .... and possibly a way of introducing a doctrine that "our rights were given to us by the Fourteenth Amendment" rather than God-given.

Also the matter of the 14th's intrinsic bastardy as the Unratified Amendment.

All that aside, does McDonald in your opinion overturn Presser vs. Illinois (1886, I think)? It would also seem to have something to say about the abysmal 1877 Cruikshank opinion that Presser (and Miller, building on Presser) was based on. Cruikshank was a Klan/Force Acts case about whether the 14th Amendment bound the States via the Privileges and Immunities Clause. The Court in Cruikshank said no, that the Negro complainants had to look to Louisiana, not the Force Acts and the 1866 Civil Rights Act, for their rights.

Presser relied on Cruikshank when the Court ruled that Illinois could, if it wished, construe RKBA and 2A so narrowly as virtually to repeal both, except for a select roster of 8600 politically-connected persons who were by State law the entire Militia of the State of Illinois.

For purposes of disarming and roughing up union people and organizers, anyway.

13 posted on 07/01/2010 2:39:39 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: AnnaZ; Mercuria; Allegra; wolfcreek; humblegunner; Liberty Valance
Interesting gun-rights concurring opinion by Clarence Thomas. For years he wasn't "black enough".
14 posted on 07/01/2010 2:46:09 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: lentulusgracchus
The 14th has a couple of ways you can look at it ~ one of those ways is as a "black person" or as it impacted "black people".

Then there's the other way.

Yes, God gave all of us our "rights", and that included for quite some time the "right" to keep black people as property.

The 14th amendment did, in fact, give them the "right" to access all the other God given rights.

Thomas wrote the decision from his own special perspctive. Ginsburg wrote a dissenting opinion ~ necessarily from the attitude of a member of the intelligentsia, or a store-keeper. Sotomayor wrote her dissent from the standpoint of Hispanics moving in on black neighborhoods and not wanting any dissent. Stevens wrote his dissent like he was a crotchety old whiteman sitting on his park fearing the young black children playing in the street. That other guy wrote from another perspective.

Alioto and Scalia got it right. You are not a real man if you do not have the right of self-defense. VERY ITALIAN!

All these people cut loose and talked about it with the viewpoints of their very own stereotypes!

Now you don't see that every day.

The 2nd is, ultimately, about a right of personal biological existence ~ so why not.

15 posted on 07/02/2010 8:03:25 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: muawiyah
Excellent reply. Well said.

You mentioned Stevens's .... what, "personal safety" racism, shall we call it? Pew's sociological map includes a specific if small demographic that is the most consistently racist in every way. That is older women, i.e. elderly women, who are about 6% of the population, who are almost universally very afraid of young black men -- and given the statistics of what one-on-one encounters between young blacks and older white women tend to be like, can you blame them? Feminists were a lot safer, in practical terms, when they had shotgun-wielding husbands around.

Just last week a black female store clerk (thirtyish) and an older white woman had a first-hand look at the crime threat, a threat in which race wasn't a factor because the assailant was a 20ish white man (with girlfriend in tow, arguing furiously with him) who produced a big-bore autopistol of the 1911 persuasion and started to march purposefully from the pumps toward the store and its cash register. He was foiled by a quick-thinking customer who snatched the store's key-bundle from the clerk, got her to show him which key locked the front doors, and sprinted to the door(s) and locked them just in time, then ducked under some display racks of magazines and atlases while the would-be robber pointed his gun at the guy demanding entrance. No takers on that -- but it's interesting that the guy with the key had to fight off an old white woman who came to the door as Jesse James was walking across the lot, piece in hand visible to all, and demanded that the key-grabbing customer let her in! As in, Right This Damned Second, and quit your games! Then she fought him off as he tried to drag her inside quickly, fight-fight-fighting without even looking to see the mortal danger walking up behind her. If the gunman had been black, you bet she'd have looked -- and ergo, her discounting the white guy as a threat put her in deadly danger and endangered other people, too. So you could say that that was racism, too. I don't know which side of the door she wound up on or what she did after the door was locked, but her (typically) female solipsism and stream-of-consciousness Unthinking nearly got her and some other people killed.

16 posted on 07/02/2010 10:42:12 PM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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