Loving and Marriage

Guest blogger Benjamin Fractenberg takes a look at the historic U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, and addresses how opposition to interracial marriage fifty years ago mirrors opposition to same-gender marriage today.  Does the Loving v. Virginia case, which struck down race-based legal restrictions on marriage, have major implications for the struggle for marriage equality today?  In other words, if it was found unconstitutional to ban marriage on the basis of race, is it also unconstitutional to ban marriage on the basis of sexual orientation?

While spending six months on a kibbutz in Israel, my cousin took a trip with a friend to the Egyptian Sinai. They found a quiet resort right on the Mediterranean and spent a few blissful days eating olives and laying on the beach. During their stay they got to know the owner, who was a friendly guy is his 30s. The man became enamored of my cousin, whose light skin, blue eyes, and brown hair must have seemed particularly exotic to him. Upon their leaving he informed her he was prepared to offer our family 100 camels in exchange for her hand in marriage. Apparently, as my cousin later informed me, 100 camels is a very generous offer.

This proposition seems very offensive to those of us in modern-day America – as well it should. The idea of woman being sold off in order to enhance a family’s wealth is something we think of as atavistic and oppressive. But this, in the grand scheme of human history, is a rather recent occurrence. It is only, really, in the last couple hundred years that we started to view marriage as a union entered into voluntarily by equal parties as a means of consecrating their love for one another.

There are those among us who argue that marriage is the bedrock of human civilization and that its definition has not changed for thousands of years. As evidenced above, this view is completely divorced from reality – no pun intended. Marriage, like our own democracy, has continually evolved. For example, in 1940 interracial marriage was illegal in 31 out of 48 states. In 1958 a white man, Richard Perry Loving, and black woman, Mildred Jeter, were married in the District of Columbia. When they returned to their home in Virginia they were promptly charged with violating the state’s ban on marriage between a white and non-white person. They plead guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison. The ruling judge, Leon Bazile, use of religion to justify his decision should strike us as more than just a little bit ironic:

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.

Interracial unions did not destroy the sanctity of marriage. What it did help to destroy was the systemic racism of Jim Crow America. The Supreme Court – being the “judicial activists” that they were – overturned the decision in the landmark ruling Loving v. Virginia. About the decision, the court wrote:

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…is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.

Again, the reactionary demagogues of the religious right are trying to scare Americans into believing that if their fellow same-gender loving friends and neighbors get married it will be the end of human civilization. Their fear mongering is having its effect, as we just witnessed with Proposition 8 in California. Ironically and tragically, African-Americans in the state voted overwhelmingly against marriage equality. Hopefully, leaders in their community will start to talk about the Loving case again and the similar struggle the black community went through to gain equal rights.

Just like the radical change of thinking that a loving commitment between equals should be the basis of marriage, the acceptance of gay marriage will help America progress toward becoming a more egalitarian country.

My cousin politely turned down the offer. Just how are you supposed to care for and house 100 camels in today’s collapsing real estate market, anyway?  She is still on the quest for that thing which unites us all – regardless of our sexual orientation, gender, race, or religion – the search for love.