"When I went to Yale Law School, they had reduced black admissions from 40 to 12. We were all there on our own merit. In subsequent years, that’s a fact that’s been clouded."

So said Justice Clarence Thomas in a May 7 speech at Texas Wesleyan University Law School, according to The Dallas Morning News. He also said that be takes offense when people say he’s a product of affirmative action, and that such policies did not exist when he attended a private Catholic school, college, and Yale Law School.

With all respect for Justice Thomas’ remarkable rise from adversity, these assertions are at odds with the historical record at Yale Law School, which used explicitly race-based preferences for blacks at the time of Thomas’ admission in 1971.

Another Thomas quotation, from his concurrence in Adarand Constructors Inc v. Peña (1995): "I believe that there is a ‘moral [and] constitutional equivalence’… between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in older to foster some current notion of equality."

With all due regard for the sincerity of Thomas’ passionate opposition to race-based affirmative action, it borders on fanaticism to suggest that such preferences are just as bad as was the longstanding oppression of blacks through the apartheid regime of official segregation and Jim Crow laws.

The two statements quoted above exemplify what is (to me) most troubling about Justice Thomas: While his judicial opinions often contribute a valuable perspective on hard issues, and while he does a great service by preaching the values of self-reliance and hard work to students and others around the country, he often exudes the concede-nothing, bellicose absolutism of a seething ideological zealot.

With righteous certitude, he sweeps aside or ignores inconvenient facts aid complexities, like those surrounding his own admission to Yale, and like the feet that the colorblind policies he apparently would impose by judicial fiat would produce something close to de facto resegregation of our elite universities. His rhetoric often seems more suited to "spiritual warfare, good versus evil"-to borrow from his wife Virginia’s 1991 description (to People magazine) of his confirmation battle-than to the intricate task of balancing the scales of justice.

As Learned Hand wisely said in 1944, "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right."

The problem with Clarence Thomas, in my view, is that he seems too sure that he is right-too unwilling to acknowledge that people of goodwill can disagree on hard issues like affirmative action, too ready to close his ears to the voice of doubt, and to close his mind to all but ideological soul mates.

It’s not hard to understand the temptation for Thomas to enlist as a warrior in an ideological Armageddon against liberals. Long before Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment in 1991, he was subjected to ugly vilification for opposing the brand of affirmative action embraced by most black political leaders.

Such vilification continues today, complete with "Uncle Tom" placards like those carried by protesters outside the eighth-grade awards ceremony in majority-black Prince George’s County, Md.- which Justice Thomas graciously addressed on. June 10, after having been invited, rudely "disinvited," and lamely reinvited.

Much of the criticism of Justice Thomas is unfair as well as intemperate. He is neither a mindless disciple of Justice Antonia Scalia nor a dummy, as same have suggested While Thomas and Scalia usually agree? as did Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan Jr.?they sometimes don’t. Thomas is clearly his own man, and has produced some intellectually muscular opinions. While those opinions may be largely clerk-written-making it hard to tell what role Thomas had in crafting them-that does not distinguish him from most other members of the Supreme Court.

Nor does Thomas deserve vilification as a traitor to his race. Some of the most thoughtful black policy analysts, such as Glenn Lousy and Shelby Steele, share his sense that the civil rights community’s addiction to racial preferences, racially gerrymandered election districts, and racial balance in schools is a dangerous mistake.

But Thomas does seem driven to an unhealthy extent by angry, personal animus against people and groups that he indiscriminately lumps together as his enemies, and against what he has called the "cultural elite." He depicts his life as a morality play, with him as the victim-hero vanquishing the forces of wickedness.

"I felt as though the people in the press gallery [at his confirmation hearing] were a cabal," Thomas later said, in one of several comments stereotyping large groups of individuals. "They were evil people who conspired in my lynching and were going to destroy our country."

Some friends suggest that Thomas, who is often jovial in private, has begun to transcend the raw bitterness with which he reacted to his confirmation ordeal. But now-goaded by claims that he benefited from the same kind of affirmative action that he now attacks-Thomas seems engaged in either bogus historical revisionism or self-delusion. He seeks to airbrush out of his biography all details that might seem out of sync with his constant self-congratulation as having lifted himself up from his humble origins, assisted only by the virtues he learned from his grandfather.

It’s true, as Thomas indicated in his Texas speech, that Yale Law School had scaled back its affirmative action program a bit after the late 1960s, to ensure that all students would be at least minimally qualified. But when Thomas was admitted in 1971, Yale still had an explicitly race-based affirmative action program, with a goal of awarding 10 percent of the positions in the entering class to black (and a few other minority) applicants.

This program operated by preferring qualified minority applicants over whites with higher grades and test scores, as was reported by The New York Times and others during Thomas’ 1991 confirmation proceedings and confirmed in a recent interview by Professor Abraham Goldstein, who was dean of Yale Law School from 1970 to 1975.

Would Thomas have gotten in without a racial preference? Possibly-he had very good college grades. (So do most of the people Yale Law School turns down.) And who knows, maybe he got a perfect 800 on the LSAT. But raw statistics probability suggests that Thomas might not have made it on merit alone: According to Goldstein, only "a handful" of the 12 blacks in Thomas’ entering class would have been admitted under the kind of of race-blind policy that Thomas now champions.

The widespread view that Thomas was an affirmative action admittee gives special resonance to his complaint (in Adarand) that such programs "stamp .minorities with a badge of inferiority," by fostering the impression that they would not have made it on their merits.

In any event, it would be perfectly defensible for Thomas to assail affirmative action preferences while acknowledging the possibility that he might have been a beneficiary-as well as the obvious fact that President George Bush chose him for the Supreme Court in large part because of his race.

But instead, Thomas seeks to revise history. Nor has his revisionism been confirmed to his personal biography. In an important 59-page concurrence in Holder v. Hall (1994), for example, Justice Thomas distorted the language and history of the Voting Rights Act to conform it to his reasonable concern that courts had carried the act to unhealthy extremes in gerrymandering majority-minority voting districts.

Rather than seek a stopping point consistent with the act (or declaring it unconstitutional), Thomas flouted the utterly clear intent of Congress, along with 25 years of Supreme Court precedent, by disingenuously claiming that the statute provided no remedy whatsoever for schemes to dilute black voting power in racially polarized areas by scattering blacks among several majority-white districts.

Thomas has, of course, been accused of a more serious offense than disingenuous statutory construction: He has been accused of perjuring himself in his 1991 confirmation hearing about what he said to Anita Hill, and perhaps about other matters. But we’ll never know for sure whether Thomas lied, just as we’ll probably never be sure whether President Bill Clinton lied about Paula Jones.

In the long run, Justice Thomas’ reputation should depend less on his confirmation testimony and less on whether he remains on the right side of the ideological spectrum-"I ain’t evolving," he has been quoted telling his clerks, in a reference to other Justices who have become more liberal over time- than on whether he can transcend the role of ideological warrior and display the evenhandedness, humility, and openness to new evidence and perspectives that are the mark of a wise judge.

He has a long way to go. But he’s only 47-48 on June 23–so he has some time.