SD enterprise: The Plan to Dismantle Marriage Equality Is Set

Monday, September 29, 2025

Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991. In the nearly thirty-five years since, the Court has issued numerous landmark rulings benefiting previously disenfranchised groups of Americans—often despite his dissent. But now, much of that progress could be reversed. Esquire's politics correspondent Charles P. Pierce digs into Justice Thomas's vengeance-fueled vision, and how it could put marriage equality and birth control on the chopping block.

– Chris Hatler, deputy editor

Plus:

Clarence Thomas Has Laid Out the Conservative Plan to Take Away Marriage Equality and Birth Control

If the Supreme Court justice pulls this off, it would be the crowning triumph of his vengeance-fueled career.

Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas had some thoughts to share. This is always a bonus for those of us who calculate just how fast modern jurisprudence is hurtling toward the 17th century.

Conservatives have been gunning for substantive due process ever since the courts used it to help dismantle the institutions of American apartheid and extend civil liberties to heretofore largely disenfranchised groups. Gut it and everything is on the table—from Griswold and privacy to Obergefell and marriage equality to birth control to desegregation. It would be the crowning triumph of Thomas's vengeance-fueled career on the Supreme Court.

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What It Feels Like to Risk Your Life as a Deep-Sea Diver on an Offshore Oil Rig

Once I reach the ocean floor, I have 40 minutes maximum to work. Diving has intense physiological effects on your body, so you never want to run out of time.

There's a technique called burning, or exothermic cutting, to cut steel underwater. There's zero visibility. You have 10,000 degrees in your hand, and hydrogen gas is a by-product. A bubble the size of your fist is as powerful as a stick of dynamite.

I remember burning on a structure: four steel beams coming out of the bottom of the ocean with a concrete cap bolted on top. The first step was to put rigging around the cap, then go in with a burning torch to cut all the bolts so we could pull the cap off and later pull the steel beams out.

As Told To Stinson Carter

Leonardo DiCaprio Unfiltered

His latest film, One Battle After Another, is no exception. DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, a washed-up revolutionary and dad to a teenage daughter, Willa, played by Chase Infiniti in her first film role. Opposite him are Teyana Taylor as the absent mom, Benicio Del Toro as the ally, and Sean Penn as the villain. One Battle After Another is a big movie—an action film with car chases, a spy-craft yarn with a clandestine agent who's drunk and stoned, and a political thriller with reverberations for our interesting times. But at its core, the movie is a story about a father and daughter and what it means to show up for the people you love. It's also very funny.

The writer and director is Paul Thomas Anderson, whose films—like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood—are operatic renderings of human frailty. One Battle After Another is his first film with DiCaprio. Both men rarely give interviews, and their life and work are the subject of bottomless curiosity and speculation.

Interview By Paul Thomas Anderson