Whoopi Goldberg Warns Clarence Thomas About Marriage to White Wife

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade,Whoopi Goldberg warned Justice Clarence Thomas about his marriage to his wife Ginni, suggesting that conservatives could soon come for his interracial marriage by overturning Loving v. Virginia.

"You better hope that they don't come for you, Clarence, and say you should not be married to your wife, who happens to be white, because they will move back," Goldberg said on Monday's episode of The View. "And you better hope that nobody says, you know, well, you're not in the Constitution. You're back to being a quarter of a person."

Thomas, who is widely held as the most conservative justice on the high court, joined the majority opinion released Friday that struck down the landmark 1973 ruling in Roe, which established the constitutional right to obtaining an abortion.

The 74-year-old justice faced widespread backlash for his concurring opinion, in which he suggested he would also be prepared to reconsider the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage in the United States, saying the court has "a duty to 'correct the error' established in those precedents."

A number of critics have accused Thomas of being hypocritical in his position, pointing out that while Obergerfell was decided on the same grounds as Loving v. Virginia, he has remained quiet about overturning the 1967 decision that ruled laws banning interracial marriage to be unconstitutional.

Thomas married his wife, who is a right-wing activist, in 1987. The justice has recently faced calls to recuse himself from any cases related to the Capitol riot and the 2020 presidential election after publicized texts showed his wife repeatedly urging former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to overturn the election results.

Goldberg isn't the only notable figure to slam Thomas for staying mum on Loving. Actor Samuel L. Jackson tweeted on Friday, "How's Uncle Clarence feeling about Overturning Loving v Virginia??!!"

Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the 2015 Supreme Court ruling, also spoke out against Thomas, saying that he failed to mention Loving because it "affects him personally."

"That affects him personally, but he doesn't care about the LGBTQ+ community," Obergefell told MSNBC's The Reid Out on Friday. "He is opposed to our equality. He is opposed to our ability to actually be a part of 'we the people.'"

"For Justice Thomas to completely omit Loving v. Virginia, in my mind, is quite telling," he added.

Both Loving and Obergerfell concerned the equal protection and due process clauses guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

In Loving, the court issued a unanimous decision ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage across the nation after Mildred Loving, a woman of color, and her husband Richard Loving, who was white, appealed their convictions in Virginia for marrying each other. Justices said that Virginia violated the equal protection clause because the law was based solely on "distinctions drawn according to race."

Similarly, in Obergerfell, the court decided in a 5-4 ruling that the due process clause would "extend to certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices that define personal identity and beliefs."

Citing Loving and other decisions, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion that for the petitioners in Obergerfell, "Their plea is that they do respect [marriage], respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves."

"Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right," Kennedy concluded.