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),

Funnily, that’s not what the usual suspects want.

xtine
May 6, 2008 at 10:07 am

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.

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.

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.

Griswold vs. the State of Connecticut