Today, in a shameful display of intolerance and craven concession to wealthy social conservative interests, the California Supreme Court upheld a ban same-sex marriages. This ban, known as Proposition 8 and passed by popular vote last November by a 4-point (52-48) margin, is in direct opposition to a May 2008 decision by the same body that asserted gay and lesbian couples retained the basic civil right to marry.
Typically, I would be expected to endorse such a ban. It is well-known that African-American culture is intensely homophobic, and Caribbean culture even moreso: in places like Jamaica violence against homosexuals is so intense that gay rights groups cannot even publish the address of their headquarters publicly for fear of murderous reprisals. However, I would like to point out an interesting parallel between the events of today and a bit of historical trivia that would directly impact myself along with millions of other black folk; a concept that is so intertwined with both what we endured and that which our homosexual fellow citizens are stalwartly fighting now: discrimination.
Let’s learn a new word, shall we?
mis•ce•ge•na•iton (n.) a mixture of races; especially: marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race.
irregular from Latin miscere to mix + genus race.
As early as the American Colonial period, laws banned the intermarriage of whites and blacks… indeed, they forbade the intermarriage of whites with any other race. During the rise of the Abolitionist movement prior to the Civil War social conservatives concocted the term miscegenation to discredit progressive debate. Much like the “boogy men” that contemporary conservatives trot out to make the prospect of same-sex marriage a frightening prospect to the electorate, the pro-slavery parties of the time used the spectre of interracial marriage to scare the populace with threat of religious sin. Even after the war, anti-miscegenation statutes remained (or in some states, were newly enacted) along with the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation. Some, like Representative Seaborn Roddenberry of Georgia, even tried to introduce a constitutional amendment to make interracial marriage illegal nationwide in the interest of maintaining the purity and sancitity of the Caucasian race.
If this story doesn’t yet sound familiar, you are not paying attention.
Luckily, such efforts at further institutionalized nationwide bigotry were never successful. Anti-miscegenation laws persisted, however, for over 50 years after Roddenberry’s amendment proposal. After World War II the laws were finally called into question when the California Supreme Court, in a case whose ironic connection to today’s events would likely be lost on the current justices, struck down their own state’s anti-miscegenation law as a violation of Amendment XIV. Following this, the floodgates were opened and anti-miscegenation laws were overturned in state after state during the 1950s… except in the South.
After the Little Rock racial integration flap of 1957, political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in her Reflections on Little Rock that free choice of a spouse was “an elementary human right”:
Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs.
All bans on interracial marriage were liften only after an interracial couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, began fighting in 1963 for the repeal of the anti-miscegenation law that prevented them from living as a married couple in their home state of Virginia. They had married in Washington, D.C. to evade Virginia’s law, but they were arrested in their own bedroom upon their return. A judge suspended their sentence, which would have been severe, on the condition that they accept exile from Virginia for twenty-five years. The Lovings took their appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that:
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 classification 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.
All anti-miscegenation laws nationwide were struck down by this ruling, and citizens of any color were finally free to marry as they wished with equal rights under the law.
The California Supreme Court ruling today, and the discriminatory leanings of those voters and political action groups who supported Proposition 8, are in direct opposition to the spirit of civil rights and equality that the U.S. Supreme Court embraced in Loving v. Virginia. Every American citizen in any sort of interracial relationship should feel a deep kinship with American gays and lesbians today. California and several other states are indulging in the same sort of supremacist hate that would have rendered our own loving partnerships impossible had brave Americans not fought for the equal rights afforded us under the Constitution.
If homosexuals are not guaranteed the right to marry under the law, than neither are any two American citizens of disparate social, political, or racial groups. We may as well go back to the days of anti-miscegenation; the “sanctity of marriage” is an equally spurious argument in either situation. What is next down this line of flawed logic and intolerant rhetoric? Prohibiting rich from marrying poor, Republican from marrying Democrat… or even limiting marriage to national ethnicity, with only the English-Americans marrying English-Americans, and Indian-Americans limited to other Indian-Americans? Under Amendmant XIV, all citizens are guaranteed equal protection of the law, and those protections we take from any of our citizens we take from all of our citizens.
I urge you to consider this the next time you look your own girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband or otherwise partner in the eye.
Comments
One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.This is one of the most well written essays on the issue that I think I’ve read.
I don’t see why same sex marriage is even an issue. People oppose it on the basis of religion, or personal queasiness, or both, and it’s arguable whether there’s even a difference between those reasons. Neither, however, should be relevant when determining public policy. Church and state, right?
This issue highlights the great dark side to democracy: determining public policy based on the “will of the people” allows for drafting laws based far more on confused personal prejudice than actual sense or fairness. I don’t think there’s been a groundbreaking social change in this country that was widely supported at the time it was instituted. That’s the nature of the game: social progress has to be fought for because lots and lots of people don’t want it. I’d say the historical events you’ve described here are even more reason to be hopeful, as those changes came at a time when vicious social conservatism was a lot more accepted than it is now.
I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes of all time:
Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, and in the third it is regarded as self-evident. – Schopenhauer