If it’s late winter, it must be time to report on the U.S. Supreme Court, its upcoming decisions and particularly about its most senior justice, Clarence Thomas.

Thomas is also the lone Black justice, although that may change in that President Joe Biden is poised elect the first black woman to the high court.

Two investigative stories have come out recently about Ginni Thomas, the second wife of the Supreme Court justice, and how her political activities are allegedly compromising her famous husband. One was this New Yorker piece and the other is this lengthy New York Times Magazine piece. I’ll be critiquing the latter in a moment, but I do want to excerpt one paragraph from the New Yorker piece:

Ginni Thomas has complained that she and her husband have received more criticism than have two well-known liberal jurists with politically active spouses: Marjorie O. Rendell continued to serve on the appeals court in Pennsylvania while her husband at the time, Ed Rendell, served as the state’s governor; Stephen Reinhardt, an appeals-court judge in California, declined to recuse himself from cases in which the American Civil Liberties Union was involved, even though his wife, Ramona Ripston, led a branch of the group in Southern California.

She may have a point. When I read the adulation that that the Times accords to people like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who made no secret of her political leanings) or Hillary Clinton (who wrote the book on activist wives), Ginni Thomas may be justified in complaining.

This is not to say she doesn’t have her issues, even with her Republican friends, and I’m not objecting to the reporting on Ginni Thomas’ activities about town. Fair is fair, but I simply don’t see the same disdain and suspicion meted out to activist spouses on the Left. Whenever the latter is politically active, that’s laudable. But if it’s someone on the cultural Right –- well, they’re compromisers.

I am no expert on anything pertaining to the U.S. Supreme Court; I’ve covered two or three hearings in person over the years and that’s that. So I’ll stick to the religious content of the piece. Here are two paragraphs that appear in the middle of the piece:

The accounts of the Thomases’ meetings and conversations with the White House are based on interviews with nine former Trump aides and advisers, most of whom requested anonymity in order to speak frankly about how the courtship of Thomas created an opening for his wife. (One said he didn’t want “the Ginni prayer warriors coming after me.”) Several said they were never clear as to whether she was there as an activist or a paid consultant. They recounted how she aggressively pushed far-right candidates for various administration jobs and positioned herself as a voice of Trump’s grass-roots base. “Here’s what the peeps think,” she would say, according to one of the aides. “We have to listen to the peeps.”

Shortly after the lunch meeting with her husband, she got a meeting of her own with the president, at her request, arriving in the Roosevelt Room on Jan. 25, 2019, with a delegation that included members of Groundswell in tow. “It was the craziest meeting I’ve ever been to,” said a Trump aide who attended. “She started by leading the prayer.” When others began speaking, the aide remembers talk of “the transsexual agenda” and parents “chopping off their children’s breasts.” He said the president “tried to rein it in — it was hard to hear though,” because throughout the meeting attendees were audibly praying.

Weirder than weird. “Prayer warriors”? That does sound like an evangelical/charismatic thing and Ginni Thomas does have a history with the charismatic wing of the Episcopal Church.

Who were these people? Mother Jones described Groundswell back in 2013 as a conservative political group, not a Pentecostal prayer meeting.

I had to search other media before I found out what religious backgrounds the Thomases have, as that wasn’t gone over in detail in the Times story.

This 1991 Washington Post story on the couple concentrates on her involvement in a self-help group known as Lifespring and spent a lot of ink on their interracial marriage, including quotes that criticize Thomas for selecting a white second wife. (Thomas’ first wife, Kathy Ambush, was black.)

The story quoted her pastor, the Rev. Rodney Wilmoth of Omaha's St. Paul United Methodist Church, who mentioned that Ginni Thomas had taken a homeless man to lunch. One doesn’t see that side of her at all in the Times story. But there’s obviously a very devout woman in there somewhere.

The Post feature also said the couple attended Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, even though he was raised Catholic. Truro, by the way, is now Truro Anglican Church and Ginni Thomas converted to Catholicism in 2002.

Where do they attend church now? That would have been a nice detail in this Times story, especially since faith obviously plays a large part in her life.  Religion News Service did a story about Justice Thomas’s faith, so the information was out there.

Instead, we get told that Ginni Thomas is radical Right — a complaint that’s been out there for years — and that her views influence his to such an extent that he should be recusing himself right and left from cases that could involve her activism. Being that Ginni Thomas’ fingerprints are all over conservative Washington, D.C. life, that could be a lot of cases.

Why is Justice Thomas’ conservative views so dangerous whereas the late Justice Ruth Ginsberg’s history with American Civil Liberties Union and defense of abortion rights was OK? I didn’t see any Times’ profiles trashing her views. Nor the identity politics of Justice Sonia Sotomayor

This isn’t the first time the Times has complained about Ginni Thomas, Slate noted in this 2010 piece. It added:

The New York Times reports that there are novel financial and ethical questions raised by Ginni Thomas’ outsized activism, and in my view they are overmatched by her right to be her own person and advocate for her own causes. If the alternative is being locked up in a bedroom somewhere or screaming impotently at one’s priest, as did Marjorie Brennan, it’s a far better world when a justice’s wife can speak her mind and rattle America’s chains while doing so.

So the Justice-Thomas-is-hopelessly-compromised-because-of-his-wife angle has been done more than once.

I know that his wife doesn't like talking with media, but as someone who covered religion in the District, Maryland and northern Virginia for more than 14 years, I know that there is plenty of information out there — online and by interviewing logical sources — on what prayer groups Ginni Thomas attends. What caused her to convert to Catholicism 20 years ago?

So many questions. So few answers. Maybe the religion angle isn’t important to the writers at the Times. But maybe an examination of Ginni Thomas’ faith and theology would tell us really who she is.

FIRST IMAGE: Thomas family photo shared on Facebook.