Clarence Thomas' Growing Conflict of Interest Problems

I have written a couple of articles of late on the unprecedented and highly questionable activities of Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Not only is Thomas' wife apparently reaping financial gain from anonymous donors, but her ties to ultra far right organizations make it increasingly impossible for Thomas to retain any semblance of impartiality on any number of cases and issues coming before the Supreme Court. In my opinion, Ms. Thomas needs to either cease and desist in her activities or Justice Thomas needs to consider resigning from the Supreme Court. Besides raising the obvious conflict of interest issues, Virginia Thomas' activities and allegiances also raise questions as to her sanity. Case in point, her allegiance with a Catholic organization that believes that The Spanish Inquisition was a high point for Roman Catholicism. Torture, murder, driving people from their homes - all hallmarks of the Inquisition - yet Ms. Thomas allies herself with those who support such activities. Here are highlights from Alternet:
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Mrs. Thomas' Tea Party think tank, Liberty Central, promotes the causes of groups that take pride in intolerance, including one right-wing Catholic group, Tradition, Family and Property, whose founder declared the Spanish Inquisition "the most beautiful page in the history of the Church."
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Earlier this year, AlterNet reported on Liberty Central's embrace of Gun Owners of America, whose president, Larry Pratt -- guru to the militia movement -- unapologetically addressed a rally of white supremacists in 1992, and more recently told attendees of a gun owners' rally in Washington, D.C., that they are "at war" with the federal government. We also looked at Liberty Central's relationship with the Missouri Sovereignty Project, which threatens armed insurrection against the government.
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Since then, Thomas has added to the "Friends of Liberty Central" page on her think tank's Web site a plug for Tradition, Family and Property, a virulently anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-democratic Catholic group founded in 1960.
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TFP has long enjoyed ties to the far right in American politics, including the International Freedom Foundation, which existed primarily as an American front group for the apartheid regime in South Africa during the Reagan years,
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[The founder of TFP] loved the Spanish Inquisition, he wrote, "because, while it went on, the Catholic Church managed to cleanse itself of heretics." (Never mind that many of those so-called heretics were Jews who wanted nothing more than to practice their own faith, or people whose politics were inconvenient to the Spanish throne.)
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The Catholic crusades against the Muslim world are viewed as a time of glory by the devotees of TFP. Roberto de Mattei, who wrote a friendly biography of Oliveira and is said to be close to TFP, presented his revisionist history of the crusades at a 2006 conference at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome.