He
was Borked (his opponents use that very term), but he refused to stay Borked.
Instead, Clarence Thomas stood his ground, faced the lions in the U.S. Senate coliseum,
and was confirmed as a Justice of the Supreme Court. Since then, the media-pop-culture
complex has continued a propaganda campaign against Justice Thomas. No matter what
you think of him, you should take the time to learn who he really is and what
he really thinks, direct from the man himself, in director-producer Michael
Pack’s Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, which premieres
Monday night on most PBS outlets nationwide.
To
understand Thomas, you need to know where he came from: Pinpoint, Georgia, a hardscrabble
hamlet outside Savannah. Unfortunately, things would get much worse for the
young Thomas after his family’s shack-like home and all their worldly
possessions burned to the ground. His father was not in the picture, so Thomas
left with his mother and brother for Savannah. To paraphrase the Justice, rural
poverty was tolerable, urban squalor was miserable.
Eventually,
Thomas was sent to live with his grandfather, who would have a formative
influence on the rest of his life. He subsequently converted to his grandfather’s
Roman Catholicism, which would lead to no end demagoguery during his confirmation
hearings. Thomas even studied for the priesthood, until overt racism drove him
out of the seminary. For a while, he adopted the militant politics of the era,
but he slowly started to reject leftist dogma.
Perhaps
the most valuable part of Created Equal is the discussion of what “Natural
Law” means to Thomas. As the Justice explains, he was seeking a legal framework
that would fundamentally prohibit the evil practice of slavery. Theories of Natural
Law argue mankind is endowed with inalienable rights by our creator—and that
divine investiture precludes any legal or moral justification for holding one’s
fellow man in bondage. It also becomes clear just how deeply Thomas studied
constitutional law, under the tutelage of Claremont scholars John Marini and
Ken Masugi.
Pack
also prompts Thomas to directly address one of the media’s favorite talking
points: his reluctance to ask questions during open sessions. However, Thomas’s
response is simple: he is a judge, not an advocate, so it is not he role to participate
in oral arguments. Chief Justice Roberts talked about judges calling balls and
strikes rather than taking up the bat, but Thomas actually means it. On the
other hand, he has written 30% more opinions than his colleagues, which he
argues is the justices’ real work.
