Hypocrite, Thy Name Is Thomas
Please Spare Us From Your Lofty Words
In Islam, Clarence Thomas would be considered a “munafiqun” and a practitioner of “Riyā.” John Selden, the 17th Century English jurist and scholar also would have a few things to say to the Supreme Court Justice.
In simple words, Thomas is a hypocrite in the grand tradition of the phrase coined by Selden, “do as I say, not as I do.”
Thomas spoke of his high-minded concerns and reminded the public that the high court would not be influenced by last week’s leak of a draft court opinion striking down a woman’s right to privacy and abortion. Speaking on Friday to judges and lawyers at the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference in Atlanta, Ga., Thomas the judiciary is threatened if people are unwilling to “live with outcomes we don’t agree with,” referring to the majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to have an abortion.
“It bodes ill for a free society,” he said. It can’t be that institutions “give you only the outcome you want, or can be bullied” to do the same, he said.
What really bodes ill for a free society is that a Supreme Court Justice dissembles so consistently, claiming that the court is apolitical, the same court whose appointments were made by a former president solely because they supported his political position on abortion and solely because they would further trump’s political standing.
This is a justice who is hardly squeaky clean and hardly embodies the ideal of the ethically pure, highest juror in the land.
Thomas was confirmed in 1991 after a series of bitter hearings in which he denied accusations that he had sexually harassed attorney Anita Hill, while she was a subordinate to Thomas at the U.S. Department of Education. Hill claimed that Thomas made multiple sexual and romantic overtures to her despite her repeatedly telling him to stop. Thomas and his supporters claimed that Hill, and witnesses on her behalf and supporters, had fabricated the allegations to prevent the appointment of a black conservative to the Court.
In 2016, Moira Smith, a lawyer, claimed that Thomas groped her at a dinner party in 1999, when she was a Truman Foundation scholar. Thomas called the allegation “preposterous.” Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
In January 2011, the liberal advocacy group Common Cause reported that between 2003 and 2007, Thomas failed to disclose $686,589 in income his wife earned from the Heritage Foundation. Hill listed “none” where “spousal noninvestment income” would be reported on his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms. The next week, after the Common Cause report was made public, Thomas said the disclosure of his wife’s income had been “inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions” and he amended reports going back to 1989.
Thomas’s impartiality was initially questioned in 2011, after his wife, Virginia, formed a conservative lobbying firm, opposed to the Affordable Care Act, along with other liberal efforts. A total of 74 Democratic members of the House wrote that Justice Thomas should recuse himself on cases regarding the Affordable Care Act due to “appearance of a conflict of interest” based on his wife’s work. He said no way.
And most recently, Thomas’s far right conservative wife was found to have sent numerous inflammatory texts to trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows repeatedly urging Meadows to overturn the 2020 election results and repeating conspiracy theories about ballot fraud. The texts were discovered by the House committee investigating the 2021 attacks on the Capitol by trump supporters.
In response to Mrs. Thomas’s actions, 24 Democratic members of Congress demanded that Thomas recuse himself from cases related to efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol on the grounds that his wife’s involvement in such efforts raises questions about his impartiality. An April 2022 Quinnipiac poll found that 52 percent of Americans agree that in light of Mrs. Thomas’s texts that Thomas should recuse himself from related cases. Thomas again flatly refused to recuse.
Hypocrisy is also known as double standard, cynicism, self-righteousness, and in the Muslim world, Riyā’ and Munafiq.
Riyā, defined as “wanting to be seen,” is a disapproving term in Islamic ethics in which acts of worship are not performed for God and because of their otherworldly value, but to impress other people. Riyā has been translated as “eye servicing” or “eye service.” The munafiqun or “false Muslims” are decried in the Quran as outward Muslims who were inwardly concealing disbelief and actively sought to undermine the Muslim community.
Hypocrisy goes back in antiquity but it was clearly explained by the author and philosopher Selden in his work, “Table-Talk: Being the Discourses of John Selden, Esq.” published in 1684, 30 years after his death. Table-Talk showcased Selden’s sardonic wit, as when he noted that “Preachers say, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ but if a physician had the same disease upon him that I have, and he should bid me do one thing, and he do quite another, could I believe him?”
One can only wonder if Thomas tells his child to “never leave the front door unlocked” and admits “I know I forget to lock it sometimes, but do as I say, not as I do.”
Or does Thomas admonish children “don’t use swear words” and the child comes back with “but you use swear words all the time!” and Thomas retorts, “do as I say, not as I do.”
And it isn’t hard to imagine Thomas telling a child, “never take up smoking” and adding, “I know I smoke, but…do as I say, not as I do.” Or maybe, admonishing the child “don’t leave your shoes out in the hall” to be met with “but your shoes are in the hall” to which Thomas answers, “Do as I say, not as I do!”
Thomas takes his place among a long and undistinguished list of the embodiments of sanctimoniousness, affected piety, affected superiority, false virtue, cant, posturing, speciousness, insincerity, dishonesty, double-dealing, Pharisaism or Tartufferie.
Here’s a very brief list.
Trump is the greatest hypocrite in human history but his outrageous actions are too many to be cited here.
There was the double-talking writer George Orwell, famous for two iconic novels, “Animal Farm” and “1984,” which both scorched the Soviet Union and communism for surveillance and lack of freedom of thought. In 1948, Britain formed a secret government organization called the Information Research Department (IRD), whose goal was to spread anti-communist propaganda. Orwell agreed to work as an informer.
Former President Ronald Reagan built a political legacy on his conservative, anti-union stance. Before he was president of the U.S., he was president of the Screen Actors Guild, otherwise known as the American actors’ union.
George Washington, the nation’s first leader, may have said that he believed in freedom but he kept slaves.
Likewise, Thomas Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime, though in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, later deleted, Jefferson denounced the slave trade as an “execrable commerce … this assemblage of horrors,” and a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties.”
Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, preached faith healing for her followers but she took morphine for her own illnesses. She also paid for a mastectomy for her sister-in-law, used glasses to read fine print and towards the end of her life she was frequently attended by physicians, not faith healers.
If you care, here are a few more and feel free to add to the list: Spiro Agnew, Jim Bakker, Tammy Faye Bakker, Glenn Beck, William Bennett, Rodrigo Lanzol Borgia (Pope Alexander VI), Michelle Bachmann, Aaron Burr, George W. Bush, John Calvin, Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Larry Craig, Scott DesJarlais, Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, Lindsey Graham, Rudy Giuliani, Ted Haggard, Andrew Jackson, Rush Limbaugh, Stephen Miller, Judge Roy Moore, Tim Murphy, Pope Sergius III, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson, Mitt Romney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Ryan, Jimmy Swaggart, Strom Thurmond, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump and the beat goes on and on.
The journalist and author Robert Wright wrote that “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.”
The website agnostic.com, noted that hypocrisy is “unavoidable and necessary.”
“If people were required, at all times, to live up to ideals of honesty, loyalty and compassion in order for those ideals to exist, there would be no ideals. Being a moral person is a struggle in which everyone repeatedly fails, becoming a hypocrite in each of those moments. A just and peaceful society depends on hypocrites who ultimately refused to abandon the ideals they betray.”
A rose by any other name and I still say Clarence is a hypocrite.