Clarence Thomas Brings Lifetime of Personal Experience to Complex Supreme Court Case
A brief history of Clarence Thomas's acquaintances telling stories about how much Clarence Thomas loves porn.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a First Amendment challenge to a Texas law that requires over-18 age verification before people can access porn online. With so much going on in the world right now, it is good to know that elected officials are once again working on the most important policy issue of our time: erecting legal hurdles to accessing sex stuff on the internet that your average Gen-Z teenager can clear in eight keystrokes tops.
Oral argument in Free Speech Coalition featured Supreme Court justices asking lots of somber questions about the state of pornography today. Given that millions of hours of free porn are now available on demand to anyone with a smartphone, Justice Clarence Thomas declared, “we are in an entirely different world” today than we were back in 1996, when the Court decided a case about the “squiggly lines” that cable providers used to scramble adult programming—or, he continued, in 2002, when the Court decided another porn-adjacent case in the era of “dial-up internet.”
According to Thomas’s friends, classmates, and at least one former colleague, Thomas is something of a subject-matter expert. In their book Strange Justice, journalists Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson portray Thomas in his younger years as a man who simply delighted in all things smut. Graduate students who knew him at Yale Law School said he often frequented New Haven adult theaters and would engage in “animated discussions” about what he’d seen afterwards. In a detail that will haunt me for as long as I live, one woman recalled Thomas carrying sexually explicit magazines “in the back pocket of the overalls he always wore,” and showing it to friends he happened to run into on campus.
The string of prestigious government positions that Thomas held early in his career apparently did not diminish his enthusiasm. Acquaintances said he continued his outings to adult theaters as a Hill staffer, and even after he ascended to the chairmanship of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, they remembered seeing him in a Dupont Circle video store with an adults-only section, where employees said he was a regular. (A lawyer who knew Thomas professionally found it “pretty amusing to run into the chairman of the EEOC…standing with a triple X videotape entitled The Adventures of Bad Mama Jama,” Mayer and Abramson write.)
A female friend, Kaye Savage, recalled stopping by Thomas’s apartment in 1982, shortly after he’d separated from his first wife. Thomas had yet to furnish the place with more than “a mattress on the floor and the stereo,” she said, but he had spent some time decorating: On the floor was a “huge, compulsively organized stack of Playboy magazines, five years’ worth of them, organized by month and year,” and all the walls—including the bathroom door and the kitchen—were “papered with centerfolds of large-breasted nude women.” Before Free Speech Coalition, the last time a Supreme Court justice heard a case in which they had such an intensely personal interest in the underlying substance, Sam Alito got to cast a vote on whether to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Thomas’s interest in pornography was of course a key issue during his 1991 confirmation hearings, when the law professor Anita Hill testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her by, among other gross things, discussing porn with her in graphic detail when the two were colleagues at the EEOC. Thomas denied the allegations, and in particular insisted he’d never even heard of Long Dong Silver, a 1980s adult actor whom Hill specifically said Thomas would mention. The Dupont Circle video store proprietor found this claim surprising, since Silver’s films were all over the shelves that Thomas browsed regularly, and were “very well known at the time.”
To be clear, Hill’s allegations about Thomas’s fondness for smut are disturbing because the conduct occurred at work; outside the office, the porn adults choose to consume on their own time is generally their business. But these days, the Supreme Court is constantly under fire for substituting its own policy judgments for those of subject-matter experts, and deciding cases based on sloppy pseudohistorical analyses that make actual historians furious. I doubt that Thomas is quite as tech savvy as the hasily-organized collectives of 15-year-old boys attending Texas high schools who have already begun sharing VPN logins. It is nevertheless a relief to know that the Court that eventually decides Free Speech Coalition will have at least one person in the room with some meaningful firsthand experience.
As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.
This Week In Balls & Strikes
Republicans Keep Insisting Civil Rights Laws Are Unconstitutional Because Racism Is Over, Madiba Dennie
A federal judge found that Louisiana’s electoral maps violated the Voting Rights Act. Naturally, the state’s response is to contend that the Voting Rights Act shouldn’t really exist anymore.
Federal Judges (Still) Have No Earthly Idea What to Do With the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment Cases, Madiba Dennie
The justices insisted that they were clear. Their colleagues on lower courts do not feel the same way!
John Roberts Got the Job Done, Jay Willis
The special counsel says he could have convicted Trump in the January 6 case. The Supreme Court’s Republican justices made sure he’d never have the chance.
Republicans Simply Do Not Think People Are Entitled to Elections Anymore, Jay Willis
In North Carolina, a Republican supermajority of state supreme court justices will soon decide whether to seat a Democrat who won an election, or a Republican who lost it.
This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated
Trump’s Most Fervent Supreme Court Allies Are Ones He Didn’t Nominate, Philip Bump, The Washington Post
(It’s Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito but you should read it anyway.)
Lawless Cannon Orders DOJ to Tell Her About Jack Smith’s January 6 Report, Chris Geidner, Law Dork
How this district court judge managed to make herself “Trump’s best lawyer in years.”
This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images
Imagine if the details of this sub were known in the 80s? Seems minor now, but at the time, knowing/asking questions about this stuff may have kept him from getting confirmed. I remember the testimony about pubes on a Coke can—GenX low tech saving a boomer sell-out🙃
Who really cares! With some exceptions - like exploitation of minors - pornography is a useful service.