Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I think the Geechee dialect spoken in Pinpoint, GA where he was born and lived until he was seven was a broken English that was unintelligible to outsiders.
It is a creole patois, or pidgin English of blacks living on the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia in the seventeenth century-twentieth century. An example of it was given in the movie Glory. Some white plantation owners in the area grew up able to speak it, and they were the first to give it an in depth treatment in writings in the late nineteenth century. Justice Thomas is one of about 5000 native speakers. Outsiders, white or black, could not understand it.
To add to it, the Catholic College group is against his opinion on Affirmative Action.
The excellence of a Catholic education is almost gone.
I doubt he has faced ‘extreme racism’ ‘throughout his life’. I’m willing to wager he faced some during his first 20-odd years. He has since faced intense political hatreds, certainly since 1991 and to a lesser degree since 1982. He’s faced them because (1) he is a counterpoint to a certain narrative and (2) he is in their way. Partisan Democrats fancy the function of appellate courts is to impose their preferred social policies and clear away constitutional impediments to legislative and administrative efforts to impose their social policies. It’s far more the former than the latter, though that’s changing as the Democratic Party seeks to criminalize dissent.
True, Mrs Opey. Please, everyone excuse my going a bit OT for this thread, but American “Catholic” higher education largely died in Wisconsin back in the 1960’s with the infamous “Land O’ Lakes” statement, in which a passel of mostly Jesuit institutions disclaimed any need to obey the Magisterium. The sitting Pope, Paul VI, did nothing, and that was pretty much that. His inaction wasn’t the only cause of the progressive rot which continues to this day, certainly; in fact, it really was more an effect of creeping Modernism than a cause in itself. But it was a watershed moment in Church history, and not a good one.
Don,
Amul Thapar, a 6th Circuit judge, recently authored a book about Justice Thomas, called the People’s Justice. I knew a number of the stories, but it is a fascinating read (even though us lawyers might appreciate it more).
While Thomas’ early childhood living in Pinpoint until he and his younger brother were taken in by his maternal grandfather were extremely impoverished, he didn’t GROW UP dirt poor. His grandfather was lower middle class, which was a real achievement for a black man in the south at the time with barely a third grade education.
Thomas called his autobiography “My Grandfather’s Son” and said that his maternal grandfather is the greatest man he has ever known.