Marriage Savers

Mike McManus runs an organization called Marriage Savers, which he co-founded with his wife Harriet.

As the name suggests, the organization's mission is to "increase the success of marriage, reduce divorce rates, and provide a better environment for children to thrive."  And as that sort of mission would suggest, the organization is endorsed by Religious Right leaders like Tony Perkins, Don Wildmon, Mike Huckabee, Richard Land, and Robert George.

Which makes this new column by McManus rather remarkable, because people on the Right generally don't give any credence to the claims raised about Clarence Thomas, much less cite Thomas as evidence of the dangers of addiction to pornography: 

"He was obsessed with porn," commented Lillian McEwen of Clarence Thomas about the years he was Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. "He would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films."

She should know, having had a torrid affair with him from 1981-86. "He was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners. It was a hobby of his," she told The Washington Post.

Anita Hill made similar charges in the 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about Thomas's nomination to be a Justice to the Supreme Court: "He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts." He was also constantly asking Hill out, which she refused.

Thomas stoutly denied the charges: "If I used that kind of grotesque language with one person, it would seem to me that there would be traces of it throughout the employees who worked closely with me."

No doubt, McEwen could have provided corroborating testimony, which would might have torpedoed his nomination. She now regrets having remaining silent and has written a book. Twice married and twice divorced, she had a career as a prosecutor, a Senate Judiciary Committee lawyer, administrative law judge, and a law professor and is now retired, declaring, "I have nothing to be afraid of."

What matters about the Thomas story is that it shows the power of porn addiction, that led him to take dangerous risks, even as a very visible EEOC Chairman.

For the last twenty years, the standard Religious Right line has been that Anita Hill was lying as part of an Democrat-orchestrated smear campaign against Thomas, so it is pretty amazing to see someone like McManus suddenly citing Thomas' behavior as proof of the dangers of pornography.