Clarence Thomas Quotes
I was Catholic. You talk about a minority within a minority within a minority: a black Catholic in Savannah, GA.
Thomas, Clarence. Interview. Academy of Achievement, 22 June 2001.
The Prince had given $20 million to American Universities to establish Islamic Studies programs however. The Muslim religion requires believers to proselytize and spread the faith, while Saudi and Islamic law prohibits any other faith from being public or promoted. It is illegal, for example, to even bring a Christian Bible into the Kingdom. During the Gulf War, American soldiers defending Saudi Arabia were not allowed to bring in their religious texts unless they were Muslims.
See {617160} for a similar legal opinion. The concern was that poor Muslims may desert their faith when they see how well-dressed the tolerated people, Christians and Jews, are. They might conclude that Christianity or Judaism is better at making people wealthy than was Islam. See {617162} for a Koranic support of the idea. The Western view of this is generally, that is what the marketplace of ideas is all about. In 21st century America, Jews and Mormons on the average were the wealthiest religious groups. The logic of al-Ramli is that Mormons and Jews—each only 6 percent of the population—should not be allowed to show their wealth, lest Roman Catholics for example—25 percent of the population—will convert from Catholicism to the other two religions. From a democratic point of view, the response should be, we so be it. That is their choice. But America is the living proof that the assumption of conversion and loss of faith is per se wrong. The Mormons and Jews are visibly more successful, yet there are very few Roman Catholics leaving their church and converting to the two wealthier religions. There are some, but not at any greater rate than people convert from “wealthier” religions.
Thus testimony was an example of one of the reasons that Black Americans lobbied to end the use of the word, Negro, in official documents to describe them. “Negro” was a term used by whites to describe Blacks but rarely used by Blacks until Reconstruction. A century later, cultural and official language went back to the language that the slaves had used to describe each other and added “African American” as well.
Clarence Thomas is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George H. W. Bush and confirmed by the United States Senate to succeed Thurgood Marshall, and is the second African American to serve on the Court. Since 2018, Thomas has served as the senior associate justice, the longest-serving member of the Court, with a tenure of 29 years, 178 days as of April 19, 2021.
