CIVILITY IS BREAKING OUT ALL OVER:

Thomas Goes Home for Swearing In: Georgia's new chief justice, a liberal, stirs up civil rights activists by sharing the stage with a conservative from the U.S. Supreme Court. (Ellen Barry, June 29, 2005, LA Times)

When Leah Ward Sears was sworn in Tuesday as chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, at her side was an old friend and fellow Georgian: Clarence Thomas. [...]

Thomas' attendance at Tuesday's ceremony, Sears said, carried tremendous meaning. "Many Americans have the mistaken belief that if people don't agree with each other on every point, they can't be friends," she said. "I hope it sends a message about civil discourse."

The invitation upset some in Atlanta's civil rights community. Sears has gained wide support during her 13 years on the state Supreme Court bench for opinions that, among other things, overturned Georgia's antisodomy law, use of the electric chair and mandatory life sentences. She is the first black woman to serve as chief justice of any state Supreme Court. But when the Rev. Joseph Lowery, one of the elder statesmen of the civil rights movement, learned Monday that Thomas would be at the ceremony, he decided not to attend.

"We didn't want to be misunderstood as affirming what Clarence Thomas represented," said Lowery, a leader of the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples' Agenda, an association of civil rights groups. "Clarence Thomas has been one of the most destructive forces for civil rights and poor people on the court since his appointment." [...]

She got to know Thomas 12 years ago, after discovering that he had grown up in Pin Point.

Natives of the Savannah area, a friend said, have a sense of kinship, staying close even after they've scattered and made their way in their professions.

"Savannah folks do stick together," said Orion L. Douglas, a state court judge who is close to Thomas and Sears. "Wealthy, poor, middle class — if you were African American in those days, you were from the same spatial area. We had no gated communities, put it that way."

Young, who was a friend and ally of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., said that he recently met with Thomas for the first time, and felt certain that whether or not they disagreed, he and the high court justice would have an ongoing relationship.

"The alienation between him and our community has been unfortunate for all of us," Young said.

Why would he accept a nomination to be Chief when it would just be a vilification fest?

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 29, 2005 9:31 AM