Clarence Thomas as an angry man

Re “Step by step on a path toward conservatism,” Oct. 2

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wants to have his cake, eat it and now sell it to us. Let him promote his book simply by claiming he comes from poverty and had a strict grandfather, which is, apparently, the core of his conservative philosophy.

Thomas bemoans liberal approaches to social justice. Conservatives -- even those as callous as Thomas -- do have solutions to social problems. The difficulty is that those solutions cannot work for more than the lucky handful who beat everyone else to the top like Thomas did. I guess once some people get what they need to live well, it erases the part of their memory where their struggling childhood lived. It should give us pause that we never seem to hear nor see any truly impoverished conservatives.

Gerald Jones

Los Angeles

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It’s hard to understand why Thomas still seems so angry. After all, he is a Supreme Court justice. Rather than ventilating in public, which I feel is inappropriate, he should get some good professional help. It concerns me that he is making decisions that affect our lives while still seething inside.

Nan Lewis

Los Angeles

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It is no small irony that Thomas, who has consistently disdained the notion of targeted redress for those victimized by the society that surrounds them, now asserts his own victimization as justification for a rigidly ideological approach to dispensing justice and a burning anger that cannot fail to affect his judgment.

Mark Steinberg

Los Angeles