The View’s big trip to the Bahamas to mark the daytime talk show’s 25th anniversary kicked off on a less than celebratory note on Monday as the hosts weighed in for the first time on the Supreme Court decision that removed women’s constitutional right to make decisions about their own bodies.
As moderator Whoopi Goldberg explained at the start of the show, the news broke while the team was flying down from New York. Joy Behar, meanwhile, joked that she almost “jumped out of the plane.”
Each co-host expressed their shock and dismay—despite plenty of warning—that we are now living in a post-Roe America. But it was Goldberg who had the strongest words, specifically for Justice Clarence Thomas, who opened the door in his opinion for the rollback of other fundamental rights for women, LGBTQ Americans and others.
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“I want to make things very clear. I’m very pro-life. I’ve never been anti-life,” Goldberg said near the end of the show’s second segment about the decision. “I want people to have the lives they want, but I don’t want to force anybody—I don’t want anybody coming in my house telling me how to raise my daughter and what she needs because they don’t know.
“And I appreciate everybody's religion, but I do not subscribe to your religion. I don’t ask you to subscribe to mine. And you do not have the right based on your religious beliefs to tell me because what's next? As Clarence Thomas is signaling, they would like to get rid of contraception. Do you understand, sir? No, because you don’t have to use it!”
When Sunny Hostin chimed in to say that in addition to contraception, gay marriage and affirmative action are also “on the menu,” Goldberg replied, “We were not in the Constitution either. We were not even people in the Constitution.”
“You better hope that they don’t come for you, Clarence!” she told him. “And say you should not be married to your wife who happens to be white. 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,’ because that’s not going to work either!”
While Thomas declared in his concurring opinion to Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion that “we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” the decisions concerning the right to birth control, the decriminalization of gay sex and the legalization of same-sex marriage, he conveniently omitted the Loving v. Virginia case that made interracial marriage a constitutional right.
