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.
19 Responses to ““States’ rights” threatens individual rights both popular and not”
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I’ve never understood why these wingnuts are so personally affected by people who marry someone of a different race (complete strangers..). I couldnt imagine caring that much to interfere with someone else’s personal life.
If your marriage is based on your having completed fifteen cultural merit badges and being handed privileges that others can’t obtain, the idea that you should form a loving partnership and that such loving partnerships should be available to all with all the rights and responsiblities that appertain is abhorrent.
You might actually realize that you had no business being married to start with, you know! You might actually be made aware of all the privileges that you have but that you did not earn.
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents.
This seems to me like an argument for forcibly shipping white people back to Europe.
Having witnessed so many interracial marriages in my life among friends, my mother, and my own, I tend to take it for granted. Whenever the subject oo Loving vs. the state of Virginia comes up, it is alway jarring for me to remember how recent this decision was made.
This is spot on as far as it goes…
.But State’s autonomy also and just up to a point enables an array (or Pandora’s Box) of laboratories for social change and experimantation.
E.g. Massachusetts v. Oregon for medical care systems.
And like that. Baby and bath stuff.
Of course, you totally knew all that a’ready.
I didn’t know that ‘malay’ was a color! I guess that’s probably the color I am, at least given the choices above.
A little googling shows that the categorization into those five races came from a German racist scientist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, in 1795. (He divided mankind into only 4 races in his 1775 dissertation, but decided to add another one 20 years later.) I wonder how influential he’s been in setting up contemporary racial categories.
Togolosh wins at internets today.
When my second-grade son learned from a classmate what word is “the N-word” this winter, I figured it was time to lay it all out for him. Yes, when his parents were two years old, some states actually still had laws against their right to marry each other. (That didn’t make a lick of sense to the boy, of course.)
This seems to me like an argument for forcibly shipping white people back to Europe.
well, considering i’m dying to leave this particular Titanic of a nation, but i can’t afford to move on my own…can’t say i’d complain.
One more reason why the conservatarians’ loyalty to republicanism makes no sense at all.
Not to entirely derail the conversation, but I had no idea there was actually a law passed ALLOWING married couples to use contraception! Does anyone know the details? I can’t believe this is something that had to be made legal. WTF is it with people interfering with the sex lives of others?
Well, ames, it’s like this;
Some people believe that an infinately wise, loving being, responsible for creating the entire universe, gets upset when individuals inhabiting one planet in that entire universe, make decisions about their private lives (and their own bodies)that violate rules of some ancient book that a bunch of desert nomads wrote 2,000 years ago. Not that the people who believe this know exactly what that book says, or follow every rule in it, to the letter.
Oh, and also, they’re assholes.
Thanks, Ptlindy. I seriously had no idea this was something ever prohibited by law. Crazy fundies.
This seems to me like an argument for forcibly shipping white people back to Europe.
And we only get that because we did such a bang up job at wiping out the Neanderthal.
About the only people who can be smug about this are the Polynesian Islanders and the Maori, although the ghosts of the Moriori in the Chathams might have a few words to say there.
Because racism, at least in the form I am familiar with here in the USA, isn’t about individual “tastes” at all; it has been and still is a social system that defines and underwrites the privileges of property.
Allowing individuals to demonstrate the bankruptcy of all the ideological rationalizations of racism would have been (and to the extent that relatively enlightened decisions like Loving have been observed rather than de facto breeched, has been) subversive of the rule of property.
It doesn’t strictly have to be, of course–in principle we could have pretty much the same society without racism. But to try to do so would call too many other inequities into question. Our society operates in part by designating many of the less desirable positions of our stratified structure of opportunity and privilege versus compulsion and restriction for categories of people who are more or less effectively excluded from having a political impact; if everyone were truly equal in the political process we would probably demand and get a more equitable deal.
I’m not pretending people didn’t and don’t internalize the rationalizations and therefore are conscious of “protecting the sanctity of the white race” or some such nonsense as the Virginia judge handed down, rather than being conscious of their selfish cynicism. But it is the selfish cynicism that gives teeth and durability to the patently nonscensical racist ideology, and regenerates it even when driven somewhat underground.
has_te, the missing element here is “full faith and credit”. If it were a genuine states’-rights argument, then it would be agreed upon that a “no same-sex marriage” state would recognize another state’s valid same-sex marriage, just as California (minimum marriage age 18) recognizes a valid Kansas marriage involving a 13-year-old and a 20-year-old. And the federal government would say that if a state says “these people are validly married under our laws”, that’s good enough for D.C.
Funnily, that’s not what the usual suspects want.
has_te, what mythago said.
Add to that the fact that “states’ rights” in the wingie lexicon means “the right of those states to enforce bigoted or religious or ultraconservative mandates”. It has never been about states’ rights in the pure (ahem) sense, ever. Most wingies, for example, scream approval of states’ rights but vastly disapprove of them in actual practice if, say, California wants to have medical marijuana, or, (and I’m just speaking hypothetically here), a state court system wants to count votes for the presidency in a manner that is wholly compatible with state law (not that that would ever happen of course),
The real reason Loving is set in stone is because conservatives need the principle that the Constitution bars all race discrimination (which they in fact deviate from when convenient) to make the arguments they make against the constitutionality of affirmative action programs.