Clarence Thomas has always been a disgusting prick

I hope Joe Biden is ashamed of his part in pushing Thomas onto the bench. 

This story is maybe more disgusting than the ones about him being for sale to Harlan Crow and the right wing.

[July 24,1991, updated Jan 25, 2015]

In an often-quoted speech that he delivered to a conference of black conservatives in 1980, Thomas said of his sister, who was then on welfare: ``She gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check. That's how dependent she is.

``What's worse is that now her kids feel entitled to the check too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation.'

[...]

When reporters recently tracked down Thomas' sister, Emma Mae Martin, living in a beat-up frame house in Pin Point, Ga., they didn't find a story of welfare dependency.

Instead, they found a story of hard work by three generations of a family struggling like most other families do, just to make ends meet.

Martin was deserted by her husband in 1973, just as her father had disappeared 25 years earlier. She worked two minimum-wage jobs while her brother attended law school, but stopped working to take care of an elderly aunt who had suffered a stroke. That led to four or five years on welfare, trying to make it on $169 a month.

That's over. She now works as a cook at the same hospital where her mother is a nurse's assistant.

[...]

[Her son] Mark, 22, works as a carpenter. Christine, 20, recently was laid off from a bakery. Leola, 15, is still a student.

And the eldest, Clarence, served aboard the battleship Wisconsin during Operation Desert Storm.

[...]

The realities of Thomas' sister's life are closer to the realities of most poor people.

It is a story of male abandonment, female sacrifice and a turning to welfare only temporarily and only as a last resort. It also is a story of an inadequate government safety net for those who struggle at the bottom of society - no day care, no health insurance, no subsidy for the ``working poor' whose wages are not enough to lift their families above the federal poverty line.

[...]

Martin feels no bitterness toward her brother. As for his conservatism, she laughed heartily to a Los Angeles Times reporter: ``That's just Clarence. He had his opinions. Whatever he said had to go, just like my grandfather.'

  Greensboro News & Record

I wonder how his sister feels now.