6/26/2009

Clarence Thomas Wants to Yank on Pubescent Panties:
There's porn websites devoted to what Savana Redding experienced when she was a 13-year old at Safford Middle School in Arizona. Yep, child molesters unwilling to make the commitment, you can read stories and see fantasy photos and videos (using adults as children) where some poor girl is accused of having drugs or a weapon on her and is forced to strip in front of school officials. Usually, it's followed by a spanking or a lesbian three-way because nothing, apparently, gets an adolescent girl wetter than getting naked in front of older women and (most of the time) men. However, real life ain't a porn fantasy. That little girl doesn't want to fuck you, Humbert Humbert, and, in fact, grown ups horribly scar kids all the time.

Based on the info of a single student, fearing that she was carrying prescription strength Ibuprofen, maybe even, horror of horrors, Naproxen, Redding was brought to the school nurse's office and told to strip to her underwear in front of the nurse and another administrator. She was then ordered to pull out her bra and panties and shake them to make sure she wasn't hiding pills there. One imagines that the female administrator then told the tale of the strip search to the male principal. Redding, now 19, describes the search as the "most humiliating experience" of her life. No pills, by the way, were found. Do you feel filthy yet?

Still, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas thought that not only was this search eminently reasonable, but that the courts have no right calling "bullshit" and a violation of the 4th Amendment, as an 8-1 majority did. That's right: Antonin Scalia, a man who thinks torture is cool and gay sex isn't, thought the search was unreasonable. Fuckin' Samuel Alito, who once was the sole judge of three to say that an unwarranted (in that there was no warrant) strip search of a 10-year old girl was a-okay, thought that the Redding search was unreasonable. Every other justice did by Thomas.

Dahlia Lithwick said she had "never seen Justice Clarence Thomas laugh harder" than during the oral arguments on this case when Justice Breyer said that, during clothes changing in gym, "people did sometimes stick things in my underwear." And Thomas's dissent is about as disturbing as thinking of Clarence Thomas howling at laughter at Steven Breyer's young ass being violated.

Thomas blames Redding's behavior off school grounds as one excuse as to why the search was reasonable: "Several weeks later, another student, Jordan Romero, reported that Redding had hosted a party before the dance where she served whiskey, vodka, and tequila." He then goes on to try to demonstrate that the majority is wrong in saying, in essence, "Um, it was fucking ibuprofen. What the fuck?" For Thomas, a rule is a rule, motherfuckers, and if a school district has some hysterical-ass regulation about prescription drugs on campus, then there's no difference between something that you can get over the counter (remember: prescription strength ibuprofen is just like over-the-counter, but bigger. Solution? Take more over the counter ones) and oxycontin.

And he gets off on the panties: "Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments," after which he cites a number of cases from his personal porn stash of Hanes-hideaways, ending with, "Nor will she be the last after today’s decision, which announces the safest place to secrete contraband in school." Yes, and if you can't take a glance at 13-year old snatch now, who knows what'll happen next? It's a slick slope to anarchy.

Thomas gets all DARE by talking about drug problems in school, but even he says, "Admittedly, the Ibuprofen and Naproxen at issue in this case are not the prescription painkillers at the forefront of the prescription-drug-abuse problem." And then, in a total bullshit moment, he tries to demonstrate how those drugs might be dangerous, which amounts to something like, "Well, you can sharpen them and stab someone."

"Preservation of order, discipline, and safety in public schools is simply not the domain of the Constitution," Thomas says, and yet here we are again. And, finally, after time and again saying that students have no rights, whether it was the days of locker search cases or piss tests or whatever, the Supreme Court has said that there is actually a last frontier they are not willing to cross, conservative and liberal, everyone except Clarence Thomas, who, one suspects, was sad that Redding's panties weren't presented as exhibit A.