Gay Marriage vs. Miscegenation

A lot of people oppose the legalization of gay marriages - for them, this poses a serious threat to the institution of marriage itself. Now, it is entirely possible that their concerns are justified - but what is disturbing, and what should be disturbing for them as well, is just how similar their arguments are to the ones which were used to oppose interracial marriages and to support anti-miscegenation laws.

Fred Hiatt writes:

[T]here is a striking similarity between the arguments used to justify anti-miscegenation laws and the arguments put forward today against gay marriage. Tradition, a respect for majority opinion, religion, science, sociology -- all were invoked with great somberness and much citation of experts and their research. The prejudice that propped up all the arguments -- and, for us, invalidates them -- was invisible or inevitable to their proponents. ...Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents, their sentencing judge decreed. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

The fact that we see the same dubious arguments about alleged harm to children, the unnaturalness of the unions, the importance of tradition, and the need to avoid social strive doesn't mean that opponents of gay marriage are wrong. However, it's a fact that those arguments were wrong before and that they masked racial prejudice. If opponents of gay marriage want to be taken seriously, they must work to show that that is not the case with them today.

Hiatt quotes an important passage from a 1948 California court decision that found that marriage "is a fundamental right of free men" in overturning that state's ban on interracial marriages:

It may and will happen that a regulation was reasonable from the point of view of the Legislature enacting it and the court first passing on it. And yet, in the light of future developments, all the reasonableness may have been lost and the regulation may have reduced itself to a mere tool of oppression -- a hangover from quaint and superstitious days of yore.

It's amazing just how applicable those words are today.

 

Read More:

• Gay Rights, Gay Marriage
• Evangelical Christianity & Homosexuality
• Catholicism & Homosexuality