George Takei Trumps The Donald, Reacts To Justice Thomas’ Insult, Wins With Fans


George Takei, the original Star Trek‘s Hikaru Sulu, detailed a recent discussion he shared with Donald Trump during an interview on MSNBC‘s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. The interview aired on Monday, according to Time.

In a nutshell, Takei trumped the Donald at Trump’s own game. George politely argued that Donald’s lack of support for same-sex marriage due to gay marriage not being traditional is in direct conflict with Trump’s own three marriages ending in divorce.

It all started when Takei appeared on Season 5 of The Celebrity Apprentice. Several years later, Japanese-American Takei offered an invitation to Trump.

“As you may know,” began mild-mannered George, an avid LGBT activist, “I did The Apprentice show, and during a press conference, I challenged him to have lunch with me so that we can discuss marriage equality. This was, I think, two years ago.”

Much to his surprise, Trump finally took up Takei on the lunch talk offer.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I did have a conversation with [Donald Trump], shared Takei.

“He said, ‘You know what, George, I just came from a gay marriage.’ And he told me, ‘They are good friends of mine, it was a beautiful marriage. They’re wonderful friends.’ And I said, ‘Then why can’t you support marriage equality? You go to weddings of same-sex couples.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m for traditional marriage.'”

Takei questioned his former Apprentice employer, asking him why supporting same-sex marriage is not possible for him.

According to Takei, Trump responded, “‘Well, I’m for traditional marriage.'”

“We finally agreed to disagree,” concluded George. “[Trump] was for traditional marriage, despite the fact that he’d been married three times. That is not traditional.”

Trump’s series of marriages ending in divorce are a non-issue with Takei.

George further clarified, “You want to find the person that you love, but the important thing here is to understand that our democracy is a dynamic democracy, and our Constitution is a living document, it’s not carved in stone.”

Next, in reaction to a statement made in Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent on the national gay marriage ruling, Takei was livid in a candid interview with Phoenix’s Fox 10.

Justice Thomas wrote the following.

“Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them.”

Takei responded, first with a blog posted by MSNBC.

“I was only a child when soldiers with bayonetted rifles marched up our driveway in Los Angeles, banged on our door, and ordered us out. I remember my mothers’ tears as we gathered what little we could carry, and then were sent to live for many weeks in a single cramped horse stall at the Santa Anita racetracks. Our bank accounts were frozen, our businesses shuttered, and our homes with most of our belongings were left behind, all because we happened to look like the people who had bombed Pearl Harbor.

“A few months later, we were shipped off to the swamps of Arkansas, over a thousand miles away, by railcar. They placed all one hundred twenty thousand of us inside barbed wire fences, machine guns pointed down at us from watch towers. We slept inside bug-infested barracks, ate in a noisy mess hall, and relieved ourselves in common latrines that had no walls between the stalls. We were denied adequate medicines, shelter and supplies. I remember as a child looking up toward a U.S. flag in the room, as we recited the Pledge of Allegiance, those ironic words echoing, ‘With liberty, and justice for all.'”

Takei further added that if Justice Thomas had “spent just one day with us in the mosquito-infested swamplands in that Arkansas heat, eating the slop served from the kitchen,” he would see that the government had purposefully done this “to strip us of our dignity and our humanity.”

He concluded the blog with a nod to Thomas’ own interracial marriage.

“His own current marriage, if he had sought to have it some fifty years ago, would have been illegal under then-existing anti-miscegenation laws. I cannot help but wonder if Justice Thomas would have felt any loss of dignity had the clerk’s office doors been shut in his face, simply because he was of a different race than his fiancée. It is a sad irony that he now enjoys the dignity of his marriage, equal in the eyes of the law to any others, while in the same breath proclaiming that the denial of marriage to LGBTs works no indignity.”

When approached with questions on the Justice’s dissent by Fox 10, Takei was in rare form and did not pull any punches.

“He is a clown in black face sitting on the Supreme Court. He gets me that angry. He doesn’t belong there, and for him to say, ‘Slaves had dignity.’ I mean, doesn’t he know that slaves were in chains?”

Supporters and followers of Takei on Facebook and Twitter, though surprised by Takei’s obvious emotion during the Phoenix interview, were overall very supportive in their responses.

Curiouser and curiouser, George Takei usually takes the lemons he is dealt in life, pokes puns at them, and turns them into rainbows.

https://www.facebook.com/georgehtakei/photos/a.737221629640626.1073741825.205344452828349/1293287407367376/?type=1&theater

[Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images]

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