Pam posted yesterday about the passing of Mildred Loving, linking the struggle to legalize interracial marriage with the struggle to legalize same-sex marriage. P.Z. put up a post demonstrating the religious wingnuttery that came into play in justifying the criminalization of the Lovings’ marriage, by quoting some of Mildred Loving’s account of the whole thing.
Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.
Taking the two together, it’s doubly clear not only are same-sex marriage rights linked with interracial marriage rights because they have arguments in common for them, but also because the opponents are the same assholes they’ve always been, using the same arguments that they always have. (In sum: “God shares my bigotry!”) The fight for interracial marriage was part of the culture wars, just like reproductive rights, gay rights, and the separation of church and state.
Loving v Virginia presumably has gone into the pantheon of socially uncontested cultural touchstones, but I’d be curious to see how true that is. After all, the concept of “constitutional traditionalism” was concocted precisely to undermine decisions like Loving. Nowadays, the judge in the Loving case that ruled against the couple wouldn’t argue about races and religion, but would lean on the “states’ rights” argument, saying that since the Constitution doesn’t explicitly spell out a right to interracial marriage, then Virginia has every right to ban it. And then leave it to the legislators to whip out the explicitly racist rhetoric. Hell, the hated ACLU was instrumental in this case. In the wingnut rhetoric, the chain of events that led to this decision—the overturn of “states’ rights”, the ACLU, the cluster of Supreme Court decisions that left people with a wide berth to make their sexual and marital decisions for themselves—is wrong, but somehow they pointedly ignore this fact.
Loving seems set in stone, like it’s ancient history, but it was decided only 6 years before Roe v Wade, and 2 years after the Supreme Court gave married couples the right to use contraception. It was, in other words, in the same cluster of decisions that was based around the right that keeps wingnuts up at night, the individual’s right to conduct their private lives as they see fit, outside of the reach of a religion-and-bigotry-motivated state legislature. When wingnuts scream about “states’ rights”, interracial marriage rights fall into the class of rights they think the state should have a right to take from you. Not that I think that will happen, because clearly the wingnutteria is selective about what rights an individual does or doesn’t have under state power, and they know that bringing back the ban on interracial marriage would not go over well.* But it’s worth remembering that when conservatives scream “leave it to the states”, it’s not just the individual’s right to birth control or gay marriage or abortion or sodomy they’re threatening, but also the legal groundwork that lay under Loving v Virginia
*Even if they could get popular support for bringing back the ban in some states, the fact that it’s a right that many Republican stalwarts, including Clarence Thomas, have made use of would put it permanently on the back burner, I’d think.
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