National Review on Justice Clarence Thomas' New Memoir

(Hat tip: Dave Hartline at Catholic Report)

Kathryn Jean Lopez profiles Justice Clarence Thomas and his new memoir at National Review Online:

My Grandfather’s Son, the memoir published Monday by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is the fulfillment of a promise. As Justice Thomas explained in an interview with National Review Online on Monday afternoon, “I made a promise to myself.” Citing the Golden Rule, Thomas recalls when he was “young and vulnerable,” and promised himself that when he was in the position to help others, “I wouldn’t ignore them the way I was ignored.”

Clarence Thomas famously doesn’t give interviews. But right about now, you might say he’s giving a lifetime’s worth of interviews. The occasion for all of his talking—starting with a positive 60 Minutes feature Sunday night—is not the opening of another Supreme Court term, although the new Court term does coincide with the sudden outburst of Thomas talk, but the release of his memoir. And maybe, just maybe, you can’t help but figure he’s thinking, I can live in interview-free peace after this. As he told me on Monday, “I prefer not to talk at all.”

But you could be easily fooled listening to the garrulous Thomas. When I ask him if he agrees with the early Washington Post buzz that he’s got an “angry” book out, Justice Thomas just laughs a hearty laugh. It’s the kind of full-bodied laugh that sounds like it comes from a man who lives life fully and well. But that’s no surprise if you’ve read his new memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, for that’s it exactly. The book is about living life fully and well...

There are lots of interesting details, such as this one about Justice Thomas' confirmation hearings and the role the issue of abortion played in those hearings ...

(At one point in the book, Thomas tells of a woman approaching his wife, Virginia, years after the hearings. The woman was crying. She had worked for one of the groups that had opposed Thomas’s nomination. “‘We didn’t think of your husband as human, I’m sorry. . . . We thought that anything was justified because our access to abortions and sex was at risk.”)

... and this about Justice Thomas' Catholic faith ...

In My Grandfather’s Son, Thomas goes through his childhood, abandoned by his father; he goes through the racism that drove him from what he thought was his vocation to the Catholic priesthood; he goes through his struggle to know how honest to be in public life, as his peer group tried to discourage the honesty he knew his grandfather taught him; he goes through the “guilt” of his divorce... And how do you get over losing your religious faith? That’s part of Thomas’s story, too. When I ask him what it was that ultimately brought him back to the Catholic faith of his youth, Thomas tells me, “my grandfather used to say something. He used to say you just live long enough. He was right.” Life, Thomas says, “is so full of uncertainties and challenges.” He says that his “faith came back slowly . . . and then flooded in.” He recalls, “I really completed my journey home when I returned to my Catholic faith.”

***
Thomas remembers fondly, both in the book and in our conversation, the nuns who taught him at the black Catholic St. Benedict’s School in the Georgia of his youth. “They were great,” he remembers fondly. “They were the ones in the segregated South who would never question—never ever, never ever—that we were inherently equal.” In their eyes, he remembers, “we were all made to love and serve God and live with him in the next life. And that was the end of it for them. And so they had the same expectations of us [the black children] as of anyone.”

But do not mistake his deep and abiding faith as a revelation of the heart of a conservative Catholic activist on the Supreme Court. That Catholicism that he’s come full circle back to doesn’t influence his Court opinions, he tells NRO. “Neither does the fact that I’m a man. Neither does the fact that I’m black. Neither does the fact that I’m a huge Cornhuskers fan.”

What faith does, though, he says, is it “sustains you. It gives you hope.” As for its role on the Court: “You take an oath to God to do this job in an impartial way.” He emphasizes that it is not just “any employment contract. . . . It would be a violation to do it as a Catholic.” Similarly, he says, it would be wrong to approach every case “as a black man . . . I am a judge.” What faith does, though, is make clear the gravity of the oath. “Faith puts value in what that oath means.”

... and this about his son ...

Thomas couldn’t exude more pride when talking about his son, Jamal (“my child is a great man”). He tells me with a knowing laugh that he sent Jamal to private school because “I didn’t want people experimenting on him in public school.” “My grandfather was the same way,” Thomas says; that’s “why he sent us to Catholic school.” Thomas says he “wanted [Jamal] getting an education in an environment conducive to learning.”

Please read the whole thing.


Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
Justice Clarence Thomas Tells 60 Minutes That Abortion Was Real Issue at His Confirmation Hearings

The Supreme Court’s Most Interesting Catholic

Defending Justice Thomas

Reading the Constitution Right: The Jurisprudence of Justice Clarence Thomas