Honest opinion about government from Clarence Thomas:
Without…a notion of natural law, the entire American political tradition, from Washington to Lincoln, from Jefferson to Martin Luther King, would be unintelligible. According to our higher law tradition, men must acknowledge each other's freedom, and govern only by the consent of others. All our political institutions presuppose this truth. Natural law of this form is indispensable to decent politics. It is the barrier against the "abolition of man" that C.S. Lewis warned about in his short modern classic.
This approach allows us to reassert the primacy of the individual, and establishes our inherent equality as a God-given right.
The Heritage Foundation, June 18, 1987
A U.S. Supreme Court associate justice (since 1991), Clarence Thomas received his J.D. from Yale University (1974) and went on to serve as an assistant to the Attorney General of Missouri (1974-1977), legislative assistant to Senator John C. Danforth (1979-1981), Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education (1981-1982), chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1982-1990), and a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals (1990-1991).
Quotation and short bio from The Quotable Conservative: The Giants of Conservatism on Liberty, Freedom, Individual Responsibility, and Traditional Values. Rod L. Evans and Irwin M. Berent, editors. Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Publishing, 1996.