Legal News

Justice Thomas Speaks His Mind on Americans and Their Leaders

By Ashby Jones

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t do much public speaking, from either the bench or elsewhere. But when he does speak publicly, for us it’s worth listening, if only because he is a man of fervent convictions and beliefs.

The latest from Justice Thomas came during a speech on Monday at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va. According to the AP, Thomas said that Americans today are self-indulgent and don’t make the sacrifices that their parents and grandparents did, and the nation’s leaders don’t ask people to act for the higher good.

“Our country and our principles are more important than our individual wants,” Thomas told close to 400 people. Invoking President Kennedy’s, “Ask not what your country can do for you” speech, he said Americans today are more likely to say, “Ask not what you can do for yourselves or your country but what your country can do for you.”

The court’s only black justice spoke with reverence of the priests and nuns who taught him at what had previously been an all-white Roman Catholic school that he began attending in 1964. “They were the ones who taught us we were inherently equal,” said Thomas, a Georgia native.

Speaking in the school’s Lee Chapel, where Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is buried, Thomas told a questioner that Lincoln was his favorite president.

“We always saw Lincoln as the great emancipator,” he said.

Thomas told the crowd he declines most invitations, but was persuaded to accept the one from W&L student Robin Wright. He had met her as a young child, he said, and had known her mother, U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright of Arkansas.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 17, 2009 (boomark / email).