MSNBC Chief Legal Analyst Makes Bold Claim About Clarence Thomas’ Opinion

MSNBC’s Chief Legal Analyst Ari Melber claimed Tuesday that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wants to jail people for having same-sex intercourse.

Host Joe Scarborough brought up Thomas’ concurring opinion in the case overturning Roe v. Wade, asking Melber how he explains to people that the right to contraceptions and same-sex marriage “now are in dire jeopardy because any court could look at the legal reasoning and say, ‘okay, well, this legal reasoning that supported Griswold, it is gone now.”

“The supported Loving of interracial marriage, it is gone now. The supported marriage equality, it is gone now. The supported right for consenting adults and this is so radical, the right for consenting adults to have privacy in their own bedroom, that has also been effectively, that right has been taken out of the United States Constitution by this decision.”

Melber agreed with Scarborough, furthering the claim that Thomas’ concurrence was a recipe for disaster. (RELATED: ‘They’re Going To Lose Their Liberties’: Clarence Thomas Makes Dire Warning In New Book)

“You mentioned sex, Justice Thomas writes in the same concurrence that he wants to go back to a time where you could jail people based on the intercourse they had. You could jail people who had same-sex intercourse and put them in jail for that. He’s not joking and this is not a drill and the court has proven that in contrast to most of modern history, with some rare exceptions, they’re changing the standard for overturning precedent, stare decisis, to simply when we get enough justices on the court. It is not like they waited, this is the first big abortion case since they’ve had three Trump justices and they are shredding what were rights until last week and perhaps the court’s legitimacy along the way.”

Melber and Scarborough’s claims are in reference to a concurring opinion Thomas wrote in which he said the high court may need to consider other rulings that relief on the doctrine of substantive due process, such as the cases that established gay rights and contraception. Thomas argues that substantive due process “is an oxymoron that ‘lacks any basis in the Constitution.'”

Substantive due process allows courts to recognize rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution.

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

Thomas noted, however, that “nothing in [the Court’s] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”