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With One Week Left To Vote: Loving Couples

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A Political Argument by CH

As someone who is part of an interracial marriage, the Yes on 8 campaign here in California, feels like a bad flashback to a time when I wouldn’t have been allowed to marry Ernessa.

Mildred and Richard Loving

Mildred and Richard Loving

Incredibly, laws against interracial couples stayed on the books for decades after the 1967 Loving decision, which made it illegal to forbid people of different races to marry. In 1998, a clause that prohibited “marriage of a white person with a Negro or mulatto or a person who shall have one-eighth or more Negro blood” was removed from South Carolina’s state constitution. According to a Mason-Dixon poll four months before the vote, 22% of South Carolina voters were opposed to the removal of this clause. It had been introduced in 1895.

In Alabama, it took until 2000 to remove these laws. A referendum was passed that removed this article from the Alabama State Constitution:

“The Legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro, or a descendant of a Negro.”
–Alabama State Constitution, Article IV, Section 102

This section was introduced in 1901. According to a poll conducted by the Mobile Register in September of 2000, 19% of voters said that they would not remove section 102. This is comparable to the 22% in South Carolina. However, 64% said that they would vote to remove it. While this is a majority, it is still far from a unanimous vote.

But because of the Loving decision, these laws were not legally enforceable after June 12th, 1967 — even though they were on the books.

I hope I live long enough to see the Supreme Court vote to allow all people to marry.

I found a bunch of quotes that I want to share with you.

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This type of legal marriage must be forbidden, said the Republican senator from Wisconsin, “simply because natural instinct revolts at it as wrong.”

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An organization opposed to this type of marriage claimed that legalizing it would result in “a degraded and ignoble population incapable of moral and intellectual development.”

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A U.S. representative from Georgia declared that allowing this type of marriage “necessarily involves (the) degradation” of conventional marriage, an institution that “deserves admiration rather than execration.”

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“The next step will be (the demand for) a law allowing them, without restraint, to … have free and unrestrained social intercourse with your unmarried sons and daughters,” warned a Kentucky congressman. “It is bound to come to that. There is no disguising the fact. And the sooner the alarm is given and the people take heed, the better it will be for our civilization.”

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“When people (like this) marry, they cannot possibly have any progeny,” wrote an appeals judge in a Missouri case. “And such a fact sufficiently justifies those laws which forbid their marriages.”

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These types of marriages are “abominable,” according to Virginia law. If allowed, they would “pollute” America.

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In denying the appeal of this type of couple that had tried unsuccessfully to marry, a Georgia court wrote that such unions are “not only unnatural, but … always productive of deplorable results,” such as increased effeminate behavior in the population. “They are productive of evil, and evil only, without any corresponding good … (in accordance with) the God of nature.”

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A ban on this type of marriage is not discriminatory, reasoned a Republican congressman from Illinois, because it “applies equally to men and women.”

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Attorneys for the state of Tennessee argued that such unions should be illegal because they are “distasteful to our people and unfit to produce the human race.” The state Supreme Court agreed, declaring these types of marriages would be “a calamity full of the saddest and gloomiest portent to the generations that are to come after us.”

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Lawyers for California insisted that a ban on this type of marriage is necessary to prevent “traditional marriage from being contaminated by the recognition of relationships that are physically and mentally inferior,” and entered into by “the dregs of society.”

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“The law concerning marriages is to be construed and understood in relation to those persons only to whom that law relates,” thundered a Virginia judge in response to a challenge to that state’s non-recognition of these types of unions. “And not,” he continued, “to a class of persons clearly not within the idea of the legislature when contemplating the subject of marriage.”

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For the authors of the above statements, it would seem that legal recognition of such marriages would offend tradition, God, the sensibilities of the majority, and the natural order. All the while threatening conventional marriage, children, and the future of our civilization. Plus, they indicate a profound sense of rage, fear, and righteous indignation.

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All of these quotes refer to interracial marriage, views of race, and the “proper” interaction between the races. They date from 1823-1964, and were culled by reporter Eric Zorn from a Boston University Law Review article and a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court. Zorn’s article was published in the Chicago Tribune on May 19, 1996.

It’s crazy how many of these same arguments we hear today about gay marriage.

Just in case I’m not making myself clear, I strongly encourage all Californians to vote No on Prop 8 next Tuesday.

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Thank you,

CH

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