Actor and activist George Takei responded with indignity to arguments by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that “human dignity cannot be taken away” by the government and that those Japanese Americans held in incarceration camps did not lose their dignity.
In his piece on MSNBC.com, Takei recalled in vivid detail his experience of being ripped from his home at age 5 along with his parents and seeing his mother cry as armed soldiers ordered his family to Santa Anita racetrack. Takei wrote:
“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.”
You can read his entire response and the irony he found in Thomas’ opposition to same sex marriage on MSNBC.com.
RE: George Takei responds to Justice Thomas statement about incarceration camps & gay marriage: Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in dissent to the Courts majority opinion affirming the right of same sex couples to marry “. . . 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.” Thomas’s foregoing statement prompts at first and last glance, what the hell does that mean?
Abe Lincoln (known as the great emancipator of slaves) defined and defended governance in our land as that of the people, by the people and for the people. Thus in this land by majority lection of representative public servants WE THE PEOPLE are the sovereign power of all in the land with guiding exception of a “Bill of Rights” instituted to protects each and every individual from usurpation of their individual rights by the ruling majority.
If in his above quote this is what Thomas was attempting to say, he only got it half right in failing to also note that those “certain inalienable rights” were not by gift of government in the first place. They come part and parcel of human creation and not from being rationed out by any government. Thus the pursuit of happiness by living free of slavery or by living within the mutual bondage of marriage are not gifts of government but are rights that government is to respectfully accommodate for the enjoyment of each and every individual—as the court has directed that state governments must do in issue of marriage licenses to consenting adults independent of gender.