Clarence Thomas recently wrote a book, My Grandfather’s Son. His life story has many themes of today’s politics. Let’s discuss some of these themes.
Thomas never knew his father. His mother was a single mother, and not much of a mother at that. At age 6, he found himself homeless and living an abandoned life. Then his grandfather took him in.
The first day at his grandfather’s house, his grandfather told him, “Your vacation is over. From now own you will obey the rules of the house, you will be obedient, you will fulfill your daily duties, and you will respect your grandmother and myself.
Thomas describes his grandfather as “a real father.” His grandfather never compromised nor bent these basic guidelines; he was the father and Thomas was the son. End of story.
Thomas was once asked, how much of your Grandfather’s philosophy do you still live with? Thomas said, “all of it.”
Thomas’ life points out one of the main problems in race relations in the country: the scarcity of “real” African American fathers – those men who take responsibility for the raising of their children into decent, law-abiding, hard working, and contributory human beings. Sort of like Clarence Thomas.
And now, with the Hispanic immigration invasion, the Black con fathers have morphed into the Hispanic con fathers. Once the illegal Hispanic woman comes to the U.S. she quickly learns that marriage doesn’t pay. First of all, the current American policy is that once an illegal female immigrant has a child, that child is immediately an American citizen, and therfore should not be deported nor have his family “torn apart.” Thus his mother should not be deported and, perhaps, neither should father.
The American policy also states that women can have as many children out of wedlock as they like; no one has the right to criticize them; and American taxpayers have the responsibility to help raise the children so they have equal outcomes as children with responsible fathers. Implicit in this policy is the premise that men are useless as fathers — it doesn’t matter if a child has a responsible father or not.
This cultural pattern has led to perhaps the biggest scam in the U.S.: CLH, that is, “common law husbands.” The mother claims she is a single mother and gets all the benefits legally allowed, which amounts to around $40,000 a year of goods and services, and the father(s) of the children work off the books; lives with the family (with expenses paid by the taxpayer); and has a “common law family.” One result of this scam is that often the fathers opt out of their responsibility to help raise the children and the children grow up to become dysfunctional citizens: not contributing to the well-being of the country, but having the same demands as the Black con.
Thomas’ Catholicism
Thomas’ grandfather was religious as was Thomas’ grandmother. His grandfather was a Catholic and his grandmother a Baptist.
Thomas went to Catholic schools his whole life. His elementary school was run by a group of nuns from Ireland. This school was in a small rural town in Georgia in the 1950’s. It was a segregated town and a cultural belief was that Blacks were inferior to Whites.
However, the nuns believed in a universal philosophy, one that transcended national boundaries.
This is one of the reasons that the old South was always anti-Catholic. The Southern Baptist religion was a national denomination, with its theology partially formed by the Southern U.S. culture.
This is similar to many Protestant denominations’ theology throughout the world. For instance, the Lutheran theology has a German influence, the Episcopalian theology has an English influence, and the Russian Orthodox theology has a Russian influence. The Catholic Church, although somewhat influenced by the Italian culture, is more, well, catholic, that is, universal.
This universality was especially true with the theology of slavery. Since slavery was internationally accepted since Jesus’ times (even the Catholic Church had slaves in the 1500’s), slavery was never considered a sin. Then to complicate matters, the Church has the theology that the magisterium (the leadership of the Church) is inerrant, that is, they don’t make errors in the realms of faith and morals.
This theology makes it difficult to change the Church’s moral theology once it has been decided. We see this current difficulty in the theology of homosexual morality. In the case of slavery, it wasn’t until the 1950’s that the Church formally declared that owning a slave was a “sin.”
The Church’s theology of slavery has another significant belief. From the time of the early Church, she had the belief that although owning a slave wasn’t a sin, and although the slave had an inferior social position, the slave was, in the eyes of God, equal in dignity to the slave owner and everyone else. And they all had the same existential demands: to love God and love one another.
The historical effect of this belief was that in all Catholic countries, especially in Latin America, slaves were considered the property of the slave owners and had a very low social status, but were equal in existential dignity to everyone else.
In America, because of the Constitution, before the Civil War, a slave was considered in the South not to be a full human being, being politically counted as only 3/5’s a person. (This is a similar theology of the American Nation of Islam where they believe Whites are subhuman.) At the same time, the Constitution proclaimed the revolutionary hypothesis that all men were created equal. By “men” they meant non-slaves and non-women. (The equality of African Americans had to wait 75 years and the equality of women had to wait 130 years.)
We can that the different definitions of the dignity of slaves is a main reason why, even though Latin America had more slaves than America and they were more cruelly treated, Latin America has had much less problems with the racial conflicts.
Even today Latin America is biased against people of darker color and there is a norm to “marry light” throughout Latin American. In a rather humorous way, the bias in Latin America is also against pure White people, that is people with only European heritage. The ideal seems to be a very light skinned “person of color,” that is, a White person with just a drop of African or Indian genetic heritage. But, given this tendency towards racial bias, there is much less of a distinction between people of different shades of color in all Latin America, that is, with people with different African, Indian and European genetic influence.
Because of the Catholic theory concerning race, Thomas said that the nuns were absolutely insistent in their teaching that the students (all African Americans) were equal to everyone else. With this equality, however, the students had the same ethical demands as everyone else: to love God, love one another, realize their potentials, contribute to humanity, work hard, obey laws, and try to fulfill their mission in life.
Thomas fully accepted this belief of equality and internalized it. This is one reason why Thomas has had no tolerance for racial moral relativity – the belief that African Americans, because of their history, have different (relative) ethical duties than everyone else in the world– especially the realm of assault, theft and murder, the duty to obey laws and the duty to contribute to society.
In his book Thomas also discussed the denigration and the hostility he has faced by many African Americans who believe in what I am calling the Black con – which is a group of false, dysfunctional, and destructive racial beliefs.
One of the main beliefs of the Black con, which Thomas opposes, that that anyone who doesn’t participate in the Black activist Progressive agenda is evil. They are (self-hating) racists, bigots, fascists, and whatever other slur one can drum up. The worst slur is “conservative.” These people should not be tolerated.
The libertarian
One of the main enemies of the Black con is the libertarian, that person who simply wants to be let alone to do her thing. The libertarian believes in small government and maximum individual liberty. She believes this will result in the best government and the best world.
Existential Eddie disagrees with this philosophy, but he loves libertarians. They seem to be people who are willing to stand up for their beliefs, they are for the well-being of all groups, and they have high, universal, ethical ideas.
Existential Eddie believes in free thought and a diversity of worldviews. However, Eddie opposes some worldviews – such as the Black con and the Islamic worldviews — which have as a long-term goal to prohibit all other worldviews but their own.
Conclusion
Regardless of his conservatism or other aspects of his personality that people may disagree with, Thomas does have courage, integrity, independent thought, and respect for the freedom of thought. As opposed to his denigration by many Progressives and Black activists, he is a decent human being.
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