Complex Numbers

Virginia is for Loving

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.
-Leon Bazile

It was 42 years ago today when the Supreme Court kicked my home state forcibly into the 20th century.

I didn't know it at the time. Neil Armstrong had not yet walked upon the moon, the sight of which is my first memory. I was only a year old and my parents lived in Baltimore, which was in, perhaps, a slightly more progressive state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v_virginia

Basically, in the late 50s, a white man married a woman of mixed race descent - said mix including African genes. They tied the knot in DC, which was apparently also slightly more progressive, then moved back to Virginia - not far at all from where I (arguably) grew up. Virginia, at the time (less than fifty years ago!) held marriage between a man and a woman illegal - unless they were of the same "race."

The above quote illustrates the legal basis of this law. I'm sure, at the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable. An argument, that is, based on a theology (which is not supposed to form the basis for laws in this country, but creeps in anyway) that is itself suspect. Hell, if that argument were any more circular we could use it as a frisbee.

People who claim to know what God did or did not intend scare the living crap out of me. If God had, for example, intended for us to fly, he would have given us the brains to develop airplanes. Oh... wait... yeah. Nevermind.

When said people are making or interpreting laws, they scare me so much that I feel like running into the relatively safe, comforting arms of a clown.

Anyway... Loving v. Virginia, like I said, kicked us into the 20th century. 67 years too late, perhaps, but it happened. It took even longer to shift public opinion to general agreement, but hell, I know damn well that there are still pockets of resistance to the radical idea that the human race is one race. One such pocket, in a racially-motivated rage, killed a security guard the other day, not far from where that case was decided.

According to that Wikipedia article, for whatever it's worth, the last miscegenation statute wasn't repealed until 2000, just missing overlapping into the 21st century (which actually began in 2001).

The idea that the government has no business regulating such things is, apparently, newer than I thought. But we seem to be getting there.

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 classifications 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 discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

So... how're those gay marriage bans working out for y'all?