When last we heard from Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, she was drunk-dialing Anita Hill and nicely asking her to apologize for being the victim of her husband’s sexual predations. Now she and her band of tea-party merry-makers are hanging out with a group that thinks the Spanish Inquisition was loads of fun.

… Mrs. Thomas’ Tea Party think tank, Liberty Central, promotes the causes of groups that take pride in intolerance, including one right-wing Catholic group, Tradition, Family and Property, whose founder declared the Spanish Inquisition “the most beautiful page in the history of the Church.”

… Thomas has added to the “Friends of Liberty Central” page on her think tank’s Web site a plug for Tradition, Family and Property, a virulently anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-democratic Catholic group founded in 1960 in opposition to Brazilian land reform.

TFP has long enjoyed ties to the far right in American politics, including the International Freedom Foundation, which existed primarily as an American front group for the apartheid regime in South Africa during the Reagan years, according to researcher Richard Bartholomew, and was once led by convicted felon and former lobbyist Jack Abramoff….

If TFP’s activities on behalf of torturers and anti-democratic forces weren’t enough to give one pause, there’s its status as a cult. TFP is an all-male organization that finds its recruits among adolescent boys, whom it trains in the use of the combat regalia of the Middle Ages — maces, crossbows, and the like…

Sounds like a real fun bunch. And not to read anything into it, but don’t you think that an all-male group that “finds its recruits among adolescent boys, whom it trains in the use of the combat regalia of the Middle Ages — maces, crossbows, and the like…” is skating just a tad too close to recent history for a church that is still dealing with members who have been doing a little too much with adolescent boys? (Funny how they can accuse Teh Gayz of recruiting just by being school teachers, but when they do it, it’s all just fun and games. Project much?)

Hey, Ms. Thomas can pal around with anyone she wants; they haven’t yet repealed that part of the Constitution that allows freedom of assembly and such, but it makes you wonder when it’s a group that thinks the wholesale torture and slaughter of people was “the most beautiful page in the history of the Church.”

(Two points if you know where I got the title for the post.)