Yesterday I wrote a post about Ken Cuccinelli's memorandum of law seeking the dismissal of the gay marriage challenge pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virgina. After further reflection overnight, Cuccinelli's argument basically comes down to this: based on the long history of Virginia's legal structures concerning marriage, Virginia's gay marriage ban should stand. Long tradition along makes bigotry right. The irony, of course, is that Virginia has a long tradition of being wrong on marriage issues:
1. Virginia's antebellum laws barred slaves from marrying.
2. Virginia long barred interracial marriage and, in fact, the Virginia Supreme Court twice upheld Virginia's anti-miscegenation law before the United States Supreme Court struck it down in Loving v. Virginia.
To this list of Virginia being on the wrong side of history one can add the former near chattel status of women and state sponsored racism in the form of Jim Crow laws. Indeed, applying Cuccinelli's argument that the long passage of time and bigotry of citizens make laws proper, Virginia should still be a slave state. Being wrong and being discriminatory for decades or centuries doesn't make things pass constitutional muster.
No comments:
Post a Comment