I think that the laws against interracial marriage and those against gay marriage have a lot in common. Knowing some history is helpful in this year’s elections.
To state the obvious, both involve marriages of minorities which have experienced widespread discrimination in all facets of their lives. The objections to these marriages were/are based not only on intolerance and ignorance, but also on misguided religious belief.
The huge difference is that interracial marriage is now legal, but the question of gay marriage is very much open.
American anti-miscegnation laws prevented the marriage between whites and people from other ethnic groups, although they clearly took aim at white-black intermarriage. The first laws date from 1691 & 1692 in the colonies of Virginia and Maryland.
Not surprisingly, such laws spread throughout the country. In 1883, the Supreme Court affirmed that such laws were in fact constitutional and did not violate the 14th Amendment (the one that establishes the principal of equal protection). In toto, 41 states passed anti-miscegnation laws during our country’s history. Amendments to the US Constitution to ban ethnic intermarriage were introduced in 1871 and 1912. Other countries joining the US in promulgating laws prohibiting marriage on the basis of ethnicity were famously Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.
So, did we leave this shameful behavior in our distant past? Hardly. In 1948, 30 out of 48 states still had these laws on the books and enforced them . (Eleven others had repealed their laws by then, mostly during Reconstruction.) During the 1930s the Hays Code, governing what could be portrayed in movies, explicitly prohibited as immoral interracial marriages.
Then in 1948, things began to change. The California State Supreme Court was the first court in the US to find that our state’s anti-miscegnation law violated the equal protection clause and was therefore unconstitutional. This was in 1948. It was just the opening shot in a civil rights struggle that would last until 1967.
[As an Asian-American man of Chinese and Filipino descent, I’d like to note that many of these laws specifically prohibited Chinese and Filipinos from marrying ‘outside their race’!]
In 1958 a Gallup poll found 96 percent of the white people surveyed opposed interracial marriage. The Wikipedia entry on miscegnation has a couple of interesting tidbits on the people from the wrong side:
In 1958, the Christian fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell, at the time a defender of segregation, in a sermon railed against integration, warning that it would lead to miscegenation, which would "destroy our [white] race eventually."
In the United States, segregationists and Christian identity groups have claimed that several verses in the Bible, for example the story of Phinehas and the so-called "curse of Ham", should be understood as referring to miscegenation and that these verses expressly forbid it.
Then came Loving v. Virginia. This was one the US Supreme Court’s finest hours. The apartment of an interracial couple was broken into in the middle of the night by Virginia policemen and the couple wasarrested for having an illegal marriage. (There was a similar central dramatic point 25 years later in the Bowers v. Hardwick case when Georgia police invaded a gay man’s apartment in the middle of the night and arrested him for violating the state’s sodomy law.) In its unanimous decision on the Loving case the Court said:
Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
I hope the parallels between these two civil rights struggles are obvious. And I hope the outcome next week will have the same blessing of justice.
Please, if you’re in California, vote NO on Proposition 8. If you’re in Arizona, vote NO on Proposition 102. If you’re in Florida, vote NO on Proposition 2.
