Refusal of Interracial Couple Shows Dangers of "Religious Freedom" Exemptions

Wedding Hall that refused an interracial couple due to "Christian belief."

Having followed various right wing "Christian" organizations and prominent "professional Christians" - e.g. Tony Perkins of Family Research council - I have long believed that not only are these folks anti-gay and anti-abortion (even as they kick children to the gutter once they are born), but they are also racist and anti-anyone who doesn't have white skin.  Thus, I believed it was only a matter of time before some followers of this toxic form of religious belief showed their hand and would demand the right to discriminate against blacks and/or interracial couples based on their "deeply held religious belief."   Sure enough, the owners of a wedding hall in Mississippi rejected an interracial couple and cited their "Christian religious beliefs" as justification for refusing to allow a mixed race couple to have their wedding at the venue.  Yes, lots of sputtering and denials of what was meant ensued, but the first statement showed the real mind set of many of these "godly Christians," especially in Deep South states like Mississippi which typically ranks dead last among the 50 states in numerous categories. More troubling is the fact that this is precisely the type of bigotry and discrimination that the Trump/Pence regime seeks to legalize under the euphemism of protecting "religious freedom."  A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at what happened and the danger that it exposes, namely that Christian extremist want to be above the law and able to discriminate at will.  My personal prediction: we are already headed down that road and four more years of Trump/Pence would lead to the legalization of such racial discrimination if bigots cite "religious belief" as their justification. Here are article highlights:

The owner of a Mississippi wedding hall, Donna Russell, made news last week for refusing to provide space for an interracial marriage due to her religious beliefs. Russell was caught on film stating that “First of all, we don’t do gay weddings or mixed race, because of our Christian race—I mean, our Christian belief. . . .”

It took twenty years after the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia, banning state laws against interracial marriage, for Mississippi to amend its constitution and remove the amendment prohibiting miscegenation. Loving nullified all state laws in 1967, but Mississippi clerks and courts refused to perform or honor interracial marriages for years after. Even in 1987, a bare majority of 52% of Mississippians voted to remove the language from the state constitution.

Currently, Mississippi has the distinction of having one of the broadest explicitly anti-LGBT laws in the country: the state permits state-licensed child welfare agencies to refuse to place and provide services to children and families, including LGBT people and same-sex couples, if doing so conflicts with their religious belief; it permits state officials to decline to marry couples of whose marriage they disapprove; and it likewise permits medical professionals to decline to serve LGBT clients.

In a fiery opinion from 2016, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves issued a temporary injunction halting Mississippi’s broad anti-LGBT law from going into effect, finding that “It is not rationally related to a legitimate end.” But the Governor appealed to the Fifth Circuit, who held that the plaintiffs who challenged the law lacked standing (the ability to show an injury stemming from the law). The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, effectively letting the Circuit Court’s approval stand and the law to go into full effect.

As the Christian right, bolstered by evangelical donors and the Trump administration, continues to undermine justice for LGBTQ people through religious exemptions based on a narrow theology, rhetoric like that of the Mississippi wedding hall owner gives one pause for thought. In states where same-sex marriages neither need to be solemnized nor honored, are interracial marriages far behind? And if people like Donna Russell believe their refusal to honor interracial marriages is rooted in faith how solid is the holding in Loving?

In fact, this “slippery slope” argument was brought up during oral arguments for Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, when the former asks: “Same case or not the same case, if your client instead objected to an interracial marriage?”

To which the Cakeshop’s lead counsel, Kristen Waggoner replies: “Very different case in that context.” Waggoner is trying to make a very specific argument here: that marrying someone of your same gender is a choice, is speech, is not a right guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment’s right to Equal Protection under the law because, in her view, and in the view of Alliance Defending Freedom, there is nothing there to protect. ADF, and Waggoner, are arguing that asking a baker to make a cake to celebrate your marriage to someone of your same gender is closer to asking a baker to make a penis cake for a bachelorette party. The inference, in other words, is that being gay is a choice and therefore that the “message” these two men were trying to convey was the choice to marry someone of the same sex, a kind of message a business ought to be able to reject.

But what of those, like Donna Russell, who believe that interracial marriage is as wrong as same-sex marriage, regardless of legal or theological justification?

There aren’t current data on state-by-state support for interracial marriage, but while 18% of all newly married people in urban areas are married to someone of a different race, only 3% of newlyweds in Jackson, Mississippi are married to someone of a different race, the lowest percentage in the country. Discrimination on the basis of race is prohibited by federal statute, and states are explicitly prohibited by federal case law from banning marriage for interracial and same-sex couples. But, with conservative Christian legislators, litigators (like the Alliance Defending Freedom, who drafted Mississippi’s anti-LGBT statute), and judges growing in power and number, how slippery is the slope of religious exemptions? And are the exemptions merely codifying what’s already taking place? 

Of course this mindset which is common in Mississippi is precisely why new and progressive businesses avoid Mississippi like the plague.  Hopefully more business will pay heed and scratch Mississippi - and similar states - off the list of potential locations for new plants and operation centers. Bigotry needs to carry a heavy price even when wrapped in the smoke screen of feigned religious belief. 

Today is the 50th Anniversary of Loving v. Virginia

Fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Loving v. Virginia which struck anti-miscegenation laws down nationwide that had theretofore barred interracial marriage.   It is critical to remember that not once, but twice the Virginia Supreme Court ruled to uphold Virginia's interracial marriage bans. Among the justifications cited for the ban in the litigation prior to the U.S. Supreme Court decision was the Bible. As has happened time and time again both before and since the Loving ruling - and as recently as Donald Trump's appearance before the Christofascists' Faith and Freedom Coalition - the Bible has been used to justify bigotry and mistreatment of others. The reality is that other than during the early days of the American Revolution, the initial founding of the nation and the last three (3) years, Virginia has been consistently on the wrong side of history.   First through it's defense of slavery, then through it's efforts to destroy Reconstruction policies supporting equality, next by its engagement in "Massive Resistance" to oppose public schools desegregation, and most recently anti-gay bigotry. Things changed under the McAuliffe/Northam/Herring regime when the entire Democratic ticket supported same sex marriage.  Yet the Republican Party and its allies continue to push a reactionary agenda of bigotry.  Indeed, they seek to take Virginia back to its ugliest moments.  Here are highlights from a piece in U.S. News and Reports that looks at the legacy of the Loving decision:

On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down as unconstitutional 16 state bans on interracial marriage. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and black woman who had been jailed for being married to each other.

After the court's decision, the Lovings lived quietly in their native Virginia with their three children until Richard Loving's death in a 1975 car crash. Mildred Loving, critically injured in that same crash, never remarried and largely shunned publicity. She granted a rare interview to The Associated Press in 2007, the 40th anniversary of her legal victory, and died the following year.

In observance of the 50th anniversary of the landmark Loving decision, The Associated Press is republishing its last interview with Mildred Loving, by reporter Dionne Walker.

Born Mildred Jeter, she's mostly known by the name she took when she — a black woman living in segregated Virginia — dared to break the rules by marrying a white man named Richard Loving.

The union landed the Lovings in jail, and then before the U.S. Supreme Court, and finally in the history books; 40 years ago Tuesday, the court ruled in favor of the couple, overturning laws prohibiting interracial unions and changing the face of America.

Mildred Loving is a matriarch to thousands of mixed couples now sprinkled in every city. But she hardly considers herself a hero — just a girl who once fell in love with a boy.
"It wasn't my doing," Loving told The Associated Press, in a rare interview. "It was God's work."

While the rest of the Jim Crow South struggled to divide the races in the early '50s, blacks and whites in tiny Central Point had long been intertwined. They worked together on farms, raising chickens and tobacco. And often, they were intimate, explained Edward Clarke, who grew up in the town an hour outside Richmond, today little more than vast fields, ragtag homes and weed-choked farm houses.

Standing in the hilly cemetery in which Richard Loving is buried, he swept his hand out over the markers reading Jeter, Byrd and Fortune — black folks, he explained, many so pale they could pass for white.

[T]hey drove some 80 miles to Washington, D.C., in 1958, married and returned to Central Point to start a new life.

"I think he thought (if) we were married, they couldn't bother us," Mildred said.
Within a month, they were in jail.

Now 84, then-Sheriff Garnett Brooks vividly recalls bursting into the Lovings' home at 2 a.m., rousing the couple out of their sleep and hauling them off to face the law. Word of their marriage — nobody's sure who complained — had reached the commonwealth's attorney.

"He told me to go and check on them and if they are (married), arrest them," said Brooks, who insists the case wasn't about race but about illegal cohabitation. "I told him I'd be glad to do it."
A 28-year-old Phil Hirschkop was just a few months out of law school when he overheard a professor discussing the Lovings with another lawyer, Bernard Cohen.

It was 1964, and the Lovings had spent the past few years living in exile in Washington after being convicted on charges of "cohabitating as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth," according to their indictments. Laws banning racially mixed marriages existed in at least 17 states.

Hirschkop was convinced the Supreme Court was ready for change, too — but the right case had to come before the justices, free of any legal loopholes the state could seize upon. The Lovings presented such a case.

Hirschkop argued that the laws must treat each citizen equally, and that "when a law is based on race, it is immediately suspect and the burden is shifted to the state to show there is a compelling interest to have that sort of racial differentiation."
On June 12, 1967, the court agreed.

Each June 12, Loving Day events around the country mark the advances of mixed-race couples. Mildred doesn't pay much attention to the grassroots celebrations.

Mostly she spends time enjoying her family, two dogs, and the countryside she fought so fiercely to again call home. She wishes her husband was there to enjoy it with her.  "He used to take care of me," said Mildred Loving. "He was my support, he was my rock."

Before she died, Mildred Loving endorse same sex marriage which she viewed very similarly to her own situation: individuals should be able to marry the person that they love.   Like the Lovings, the husband and I were married in the District of Columbia since same sex marriage was illegal at the time in Virginia.  No one was harmed by the Lovings' marriage.  No one was harmed by my marriage to my husband.  Yet the same forces of hate and division that made both marriages illegal in Virginia are alive and well.   All three of the Republican candidates for governor are beholden to the Christofascists who support both bans on interracial marriage and same sex marriage.  In Virginia and elsewhere religion has been used to justify so much hared and abuse of others.  Today is a perfect day to remember that religion has no place in America's civil laws. 

Anti-Gay Marriage Bill Sent Back to Committee Over Interracial Marriage Concerns

Was Carrico trying to give a pass to racist clerks?

In his quest to prostitute himself to the rabid Christofascists of the Virginia GOP base and/or stay in the good graces of the foul haters at The Family Foundation who threaten primary contests against those who do not do their bidding, Charles W. Carrico Sr. (R-Grayson) introduced the so-called "Kim Davis bill" which would allow circuit court clerks to refuse to issue marriage licenses to any couples if doing so offended their beliefs.  The bill was put forward supposedly to protect "religious freedom" but really is a license to discriminate effort.  On Wednesday, the bill was passed out of committee on a partisan vote - Republicans out numbering Democrats - to move to the full Virginia Senate.  

Now, given the lack of any limits on alleged religious belief that could motivate a protesting clerk, the bill has been sent back to the Senate Courts of Justice Committee because as written, segregationist could cite the Bible and refuse to issue licenses to interracial couples.  Carrico claims that such was not his intent - only gays were supposedly targeted- but given the very strong racist undertones of the agenda of The Family Foundation that I have observed over the years, I cannot candidly believe Carrico's story line.  The fact is that the Bible was long cited as justification for slavery, segregation and interracial bans in Virginia - the Virginia Supreme Court even did so in the Loving case before being overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court.  The Washington Post looks at the chaos Carrico's bill would potentially unleash.  Here are highlights:

Virginia legislators on Friday decided to take a closer look at a bill to make sure that it would not let court clerks deny marriage licenses to interracial couples.

The measure, which passed out of a committee to the full Senate this week, was intended to protect clerks who object to issuing licenses to same-sex couples, something the bill’s Republican sponsor promoted as a matter of religious freedom.

But the legislation provided such wide latitude to refuse licenses that Sen. Charles W. Carrico Sr. (R-Grayson) initially said that it would cover clerks who objected to marriages on any grounds, including those based on objections to interracial marriage. . . . on Friday, he asked to have his bill sent back to the Senate Courts of Justice Committee for further study.

The bill would give clerks or deputy clerks the freedom to refuse to issue licenses to couples if they object to their unions on “personal, ethical, moral, or religious grounds.” Those they turn away could be issued marriage licenses at a Department of Motor Vehicle office — an option that critics liken to the “separate-but-equal” justification for segregated schools that was ultimately declared unconstitutional.

The legislation does not specify any class of couples that could be denied licenses from clerks, but Democrats dubbed it the “Kim Davis bill,” a reference to the Kentucky clerk who was jailed last year after refusing to issue licenses to same-sex couples.

Opponents, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, contend that the measure — even as intended — is unconstitutional. But supporters, including the Family Foundation of Virginia, said it is needed to protect religious liberties in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in June that legalized gay marriage.

The bill passed the Senate Courts of Justice Committee on Wednesday night over the objections of all six Democrats and one Republican, freshman Sen. Glen Sturtevant of Richmond.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) vowed to veto the measure if it reaches his desk.

There is an easy solution: public officials need to either do their jobs or seek other employment.  Religious belief does not belong in the public square and no one in public should be allowed to cite real or feigned religious belief to ignore the law and the U.S. Constitution.  End of discussion.

Jeb Bush: States Should Determine Marriage Rights

Under the reasoning of likely GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush, state bans on interracial marriage should still be valid.  Or at least that is the take away from his statements that states should be free to decide whether or not same sex couples should have the right to marry. As for the rights of citizens under the U.S. Constitution, Bush would simply brush those aside.  The position is akin to that of "states rights" advocates that long used that argument to support Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory state laws.  LGBTQ Nation has details.  Here are highlights:

As he considers running for president, former governor Jeb Bush is not offering supportive words about same-sex marriages coming to the state of Florida.

“It ought be a local decision. I mean, a state decision,” Bush told the Miami Herald on Sunday. “The state decided. The people of the state decided. But it’s been overturned by the courts, I guess.”

On Monday, Bush issued a follow-up statement, saying “We live in a democracy, and regardless of our disagreements, we have to respect the rule of law.”

He called for respect for those on both sides of the issue, including committed gay couples and “those of us who believe marriage is a sacrament and want to safeguard religious liberty.”

Bush’s comments are in line with past statements, but with same-sex marriage set to become legal in Florida on Tuesday, his remarks are sure to bring attention to his guarded approach to gay rights by both supporters and opponents of marriage equality.

As governor, he was against same-sex marriage but wasn’t publicly enthusiastic about the successful 2008 campaign to rewrite the Florida Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman.

Bush, who left office in 2007, said the change wasn’t needed, since state law already restricted marriage to heterosexual couples. Two years ago, he suggested in a PBS interview that gay parents could be held up as role models, even as he said “traditional marriage is what should be sanctioned” by the government.

 We truly do not need another Bush in the White House. Likewise, we don't need religion intertwined in the civil laws.

House of Delegates Seeks to Take Mark Herring Off Gay Marriage Case

Proving yet again that the Republican Party of Virginia is little more than a band of political prostitutes that always seek to do the biding of the hate merchants at The Family Foundation - and that the Virginia GOP cares nothing about the Virginia Constitution or Code of Virginia - the House of Delegates in a partisan vote authorized Whore-in-Chief House Speaker William J. Howell to hire outside legal counsel to replace Attorney General Mark Herring in the same-sex marriage lawsuit now on appeal to the United States Supreme Court.  It's yet another example of the Virginia GOP seeking to waste taxpayer funds on a cause not supported by a majority of Virginians.  The Richmond Times Dispatch has details:

The House of Delegates voted 65-32 on Thursday to approve a resolution that empowers the speaker of the House to hire outside legal counsel to replace Attorney General Mark R. Herring in the same-sex marriage lawsuit filed against the state but supported by the Attorney General’s Office.

The resolution also empowers the speaker to hire outside counsel if Gov. Terry McAuliffe were to try to expand the state’s Medicaid program without legislative approval or in any other case in which the governor or attorney general declined to defend a state law.

The resolution states the position of the House and does not require Senate or gubernatorial approval. 

Michael Kelly, a spokesman for the attorney general, said in a statement:

“The House should focus on the reason it is here, which is to find a way to extend health care coverage to low-income Virginians, not to waste taxpayers’ money and time on a meaningless resolution that flies in the face of our constitution’s separation of powers.”

Herring had announced in January that he found Virginia’s amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman to be in violation of the U.S. Constitution. He refused to defend the law in a federal suit seeking to overturn the same-sex marriage ban.

A federal court in Norfolk has since thrown out the state ban. The ruling was affirmed by a panel of federal appeals court judges in Richmond in June. The case is now headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Today's Republican Party of Virginia is just a reworked version of those who fought to maintain Virginia's ban on interracial marriage.  Bigotry is the main pillar of the party.

Ted Olson: Ted Cruz Sounds Like A Racist

As readers have likely figured out, I have no love for Texas Senator Ted Cruz who in my view seeks to be another Joe McCarthy.  Cruz panders to the worse instincts of an already racist and extremist GOP base.  Sadly, too many prominent Republicans are afraid to directly call Cruz out.  Now, Ted Olson - who is already viewed as a heretic by anti-gay elements in the GOP - has stated the obvious and said that Cruz sounds like a racist when he wants the majority to be able to strip minorities of civil rights.  Think Progress looks at Olson's remarks.  Here are highlights:

A leading Republican litigator argued on Tuesday that Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) opposition to marriage equality was reminiscent of the sentiment advanced by racists during the 1970s. Ted Olson made the accusation during an appearance on SiriusXM radio’s The Agenda.

A new New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin quotes a Cruz speech this month in which the first-term Senator condemned the Supreme Court’s ruling that effectively struck down down California’s unconstitutional Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage. Cruz told the Texas Republican Convention that “marriage is under assault,” adding, “You want to know what judicial activism is? Judicial activism is judges imposing their policy preferences on the words of the Constitution.”

The Agenda host Ari Rabin-Havt asked Olson, who served as President George W. Bush’s solicitor general and joined with former Al Gore campaign counsel David Boies to challenge Proposition 8, about Cruz’s remarks. Olson slammed Cruz’s thinking as “very, very sad,” “very unfortunate,” and reminiscent of the argument advanced by backed anti-miscegenation laws:

OLSON: It’s the same sort of thing that people said forty-some years ago when the Supreme Court overturned the laws of 17 states, supported by two-thirds of the population of the United States, that made it a felony to marry someone of a different race. That case, called Loving v. Virginia, is a landmark in the jurisprudence of the SC, striking down as unconstitutional a law that would have prevented the president’s mother and father from getting married and being in Virginia at the time that he was born. It’s a sad thing when people don’t understand that the people cannot vote away the rights of minorities, that people cannot engraft into their constitution provisions that discriminate against a segment of our society — whether that be persons of a particular race or nationality, or laws that discriminate against women. We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of laws that have discriminated against women over the years that the Supreme Court has struck down. Ted Cruz is just plain wrong about that and it’s unfortunate because that is not and should not be the future of the Republican Party.

Olson concluded by noting that his party “should embrace conservative values which include liberty, happiness, equality for all persons, and marriage is a conservative value.

Will Hispanics Be Tomorrow's Whites?

In right wing circles and throughout much of the GOP base, the thought that Hispanics - except those perhaps from Spain - are whites is tantamount to heresy.  One need only listen to the spittle flecked rants against immigrants to get a feel for the animus held toward those less than 100% Caucasian.  But with America's rapidly changing demographics, the issue of who is white may again come to the fore.  A piece in Slate looks at the issue and some of the ramifications that may be seen in the short and the long term.  Here are highlights:

Who is white? This debate is useful to keep in mind as we sift through the information in the Pew Research Center’s new—and massive—look at America’s shifting demographics.

According to Pew—and echoing the results in the last census—the United States is just a few decades away from its demographic inflection point. Come 2050, only 47 percent of Americans will call themselves white, while the majority will belong to a minority group. Blacks will remain steady at 13 percent of the population, while Asians will grow to 8 percent. Hispanics, on the other hand, will explode to 28 percent of all U.S. population, up from 19 percent in 2010. Immigration is driving this “demographic makeover,” specifically the “40 million immigrants who have arrived since 1965, about half of them Hispanics and nearly three-in-ten Asians.”

But the thing to remember about the Hispanic category, for instance, is that it contains a wide range of colors and ethnicities. In the United States, Hispanics (or more broadly Latinos) include Afro-Brazilians, dark-skinned Puerto Ricans, indigenous Mexicans, Venezuelan mestizos, and European Argentinians, among others.

To say that America will become a majority-minority country is to erase these distinctions and assume that, for now and forever, Latinos will remain a third race, situated next to “non-Hispanic blacks” and “non-Hispanic whites.”  . . . .  it’s not that simple.

American racial categories are far from fixed, and who counts as white is extremely fluid. “A hundred years ago,” writes Ian Haney López in Dog Whistle Politics, “firm racial lines elevated Anglo-Saxons over the supposedly degenerate races from southern and eastern Europe.” For a large chunk of the 19^th century—and a good deal of the 20^th—America’s intellectual energy was devoted to policing the boundaries of “whiteness.”

Over time, however, as new immigrants entered the country and old ones gained access to levers of power and influence, the boundaries grew to include them.

It’s hard to say history is repeating itself—the circumstances of the early 21^st century are vastly different from those of the late 19^th—but the current period does seem to rhyme with the past. Over the last 50 years of large-scale Latino and Asian immigration, we’ve seen waves of anti-immigrant hysteria (Proposition 187 in California and the minutemen along the Mexican border), attempts to keep high-achieving immigrants and their children out of elite institutions, and intermarriage leading to assimilation—one of the most famous comedians in the world, Louis C.K., is half-Mexican, but to most Americans, he’s just a white guy.

Going forward, will white Hispanics see themselves as part of a different race—light-skinned but distinct from whites—or will they see themselves as another kind of white? Will the government treat them as white in its forms and surveys, and will so-called traditional white Americans understand them as such? What about the children of mixed marriages? As Pew points out, we live in an age of intermarriage. More than 15 percent of new marriages are between partners of different races, and the large majority of them are Hispanic and Asian “out marriage” to whites. Will these children retain a racial identity, or will they join the vast tapestry of American whiteness?

These are critical questions, since—in a country where white Hispanics are just white, and Asians intermarry at high rates—the white population of the United States could stay steady or actually grow.

The future could make a collection of minorities the majority in America, or it could broaden our definition of white, leaving us with a remix of the black-and-white binary. A country where some white people are Asian, some are Hispanic, and the dark-skinned citizens of America—and blacks especially—is still a world apart.

For now at least, "white" to the GOP means white of European descent, conservative Protestant (preferably evangelical), and heterosexual.  As the demographics continue to change that GOP base and definition of white will shrink in numbers and yet again causes me to ask why the GOP is busy committing long term political suicide?   When will the GOP come to the point of just seeing people as people regardless of skin tone?  Meanwhile, Tony Perkins, Victoria Cobb and others of their ilk will continue to preach hate while wrapping themselves in false piety and religiosity.

CPAC Speaker: States Have Never Banned Gay Marriage, 'That's A Liberal Lie!'

As maddening as some of the batshitery at CPAC may be, the gathering does fulfill one purpose: it allows the far right to document to the world how insane they really are and utterly out of touch with objective reality the fantasy world they live in has come to be.  A case in point? Michael Medved who told a panel that no state has ever banned same sex marriage and that claims to the contrary are a "liberal lie."  Apparently, Medved has never bothered to read Virginia's Marshall-Newman Amendment which quite explicitly not only bans same sex marriage but any legal recognition of same sex relationships whatsoever.  The man is either a total  lunatic or a complete liar (or perhaps both).  The "godly folks never let the truth get in the way of their hate filled agenda.  Once again, Right Wing Watch has details:

Right-wing talk show host Michael Medved told a CPAC panel sponsored by Focus on the Family today that same-sex marriage has never been banned. While debating the issue of marriage equality with Alexander McCobin of Students for Liberty, Medved claimed, “There’s never been a state in this country that has ever banned gay marriage, that’s a liberal lie.”

Medved seemed to be citing the Religious Right talking point that marriage bans aren’t discriminatory since a gay person could marry someone of the opposite sex, which is the same arguments once made by opponents of the legalization of interracial marriage.

Yes, you read that correctly - it's the same defense used to defend bans on interracial marriage.  These people never change and are, if anything, increasingly toxic. 

Michael Medved

The Legacy of Loving v. Virginia Lives On in Gay Marriage Rulings

Mildred and Richard Loving

Richmond Virginia is the former capital of the Confederate States of America and the Richmond Times Dispatch has to rank as one of the most reactionary conservative newspapers in Virginia. Yet, it the wake of the ruling in Bostic v. Rainey which struck down Virginia's anti-gay marriage ban, the Times Dispatch has been surprising in respect to some of the editorials that it has run even as it has attacked Mark Herring for refusing to defend the unconstitutional Marshall-Newman Amendment.   Yesterday, an op-ed was particularly salient to the issue.  Here are excerpts:

Opponents of same-sex marriage object, often strenuously, to comparisons with interracial marriage. Homosexuality is a behavior rather than a trait, they contend, and men and women of different races are sexually compatible in a way that same-gender couples are not.

All analogies are inexact. But for practical purposes, whether the comparison holds up in every possible regard matters less than whether it holds up in legal terms. And from that perspective, the comparison is proving powerful indeed. So far six federal judges have ruled against state restrictions on gay marriage, and every one of them has invoked Loving v. Virginia — the 1967 case in which the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage.

Defenders of bans on same-sex marriage have appealed to tradition — i.e., old habit. That’s an awfully weak argument, given our history. Slavery was traditional. Denying women the vote was traditional. So was a lot of gun control.

Federal Judge Arenda Wright Allen certainly didn’t buy the argument when she ruled against Virginia’s ban.

Wright Allen noted that “other profound infringements upon our citizens’ rights have been explained as a consequence of heritage, and those explanations have been found wanting.” Quoting another Supreme Court case (Casey), she said interracial marriage “was illegal in most States in the 19th century, but the Court was no doubt correct in finding it to be an aspect of liberty protected against state interference by the substantive component of the Due Process Clause in Loving v. Virginia.” Elsewhere, she points out that “nearly identical concerns about the significance of tradition were presented to, and resolved by, the Supreme Court in its Loving decision.”

Last week a federal judge struck down Texas’ ban on gay marriage. Judge Orlando Garcia quotes the same passage from Casey as the one above. He goes on to say that Texas claims the debate is merely definitional: In the state’s view, “plaintiffs are seeking recognition of a ‘new right to same-sex marriage’ as opposed to the existing ‘right to marry.’ This Court finds this argument fails, as the Supreme Court did not adopt this line of reasoning in the analogous Loving v. Virginia. Instead of declaring a new right to interracial marriage, the Court held that individuals could not be restricted from exercising their ‘existing’ right to marry on account of their chosen partner. . . . That is, an interracial marriage was considered to be a subset of ‘marriage,’ in the same way that same-sex marriage is included within the fundamental right to marry.”

Moreover, “this fundamental right to marry also entails the ability to marry the partner of one’s choosing. See generally Loving. . . .”

A similar ruling requiring Ohio to recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages also cited Loving more than a half-dozen times. And when he struck down Oklahoma’s ban on gay marriage, federal judge Terence C. Kern noted that “in discussing [the] traditional state authority over marriage, the Supreme Court repeatedly used the disclaimer ‘subject to constitutional guarantees.’ . . . (citing Loving v. Virginia. . . .) A citation to Loving is a disclaimer of enormous proportion.”
Apparently so.

Courts — including the Supreme Court — can be wrong. Sometimes egregiously so. But there is a reason so many courts have referred to Loving again and again: The arguments for laws banning gay marriage and the arguments for laws banning interracial marriage are nearly identical: Tradition. States’ rights. Government’s presumed interest in the ordering of private relationships for the sake of an ostensible public good.

Those arguments did not hold up in 1967, and they don’t hold up now. Government’s core purpose consists of protecting people from harm they don’t consent to. The trouble confronting opponents of gay marriage, like opponents of interracial marriage before them, is that they can produce nobody whose rights have been violated by somebody else’s marriage.

The Christofascists are losing the war on same sex marriage and ultimately, the longer that they resist equalitythe more the hurt their own image and reputation in the eyes of history.  There is a good reason why the younger generations are fleeing organized Christianity in droves: Jesus preached acceptance, tolerance and love.  In contrast, the Christofascist preach hate, bigotry and intolerance and in the process make the Pharisees of the Bible look righteous and upstanding in comparison.

Attorney Who Argued Loving v. Virginia Reflects on Norfolk Marriage Ruling

Last week's ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia that struck down Virginia's same sex marriage bans cited the United States Supreme Court's landmark decision in Loving v. Virginia as part of the legal precedent that required the Marshall-Newman Amendment to be declared unconstitutional.  Stripped of all feigned justifications, Virginia's same sex marriage ban like Virginia's former ban on interracial marriage relied on one thing and one thing only as its true motivation: hate, prejudice and bigotry, with the Bible used as justification in both instances.  Today's opponents of same sex marriage are indeed the descendants of the segregationists who wanted to prevent ‘the corruption of blood’ and ‘a mongrel breed of citizens.’ A column in the Richmond Times Dispatch contains the reflections of the attorney (pictured at right) who represented Richard and Mildred Loving in Loving v. Virginia.  Here are excerpts:

You can still hear the disbelief in 80-year-old Bernie Cohen’s voice. “Why did the Ku Klux Klan dig in after we won the Loving case?” he said Tuesday from his home in rural Spotsylvania County, not far from the hamlet where his history-making clients lived. “It’s because of deep, ingrained prejudice, which is not subject to being educated — not subject to being persuaded to being educated.”

Cohen was a lawyer for Richard and Mildred Loving of Caroline County in the interracial couple’s successful challenge to Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law. It banned men and women of different color from marrying. The 1924 statute, rooted in ancient Virginia practice, was designed by the state’s white power elite to enforce separation of the races — to protect an allegedly superior white race from supposed dilution.

Loving v. Virginia — argued by Cohen, a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn who would score breakthroughs as a member of the same legislature that had banned interracial marriage — is a landmark case that is resonating nearly 50 years later in another culture-changing legal dispute: same-sex marriage.

In junking Virginia’s 7-year-old, voter-approved constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen drew heavily on the Loving decision — stirring memories for Cohen as well as his combative spirit.

“It’s a magnificent opinion,” Cohen said Tuesday. “I really was taken by it as I read it. … I was just amazed at the thoroughness of it.”

“Similar fears were voiced and ultimately quieted after Virginia unsuccessfully defended its anti-miscegenation laws by referring to a need to ‘preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,’ and to prevent ‘the corruption of blood,’ ‘a mongrel breed of citizens’ and ‘the obliteration of racial pride.’ ”

Cohen said the pattern of Wright Allen’s ruling reflects the argument that he and his law partner at the time, Phil Hirschkop, made to the Supreme Court in the Loving case.

They emphasized, first, the restriction on interracial marriage violated the couple’s right to due process; that as a fundamental liberty, they were entitled to marry in Virginia. The lawyers’ second point was that by prohibiting the Lovings from marrying here — they were wed in Washington, D.C., in 1958 — the couple was denied equal protection under the law.

Anti-miscegenation laws — despite their neutering by the Supreme Court in Loving — remained on the books in many states. Alabama, a bloody crossroads in the nation’s civil rights struggle, finally repealed its law in a special election in 2000.

“There was a stubbornness to it,” said Cohen, who hears an echo of the reaction to Loving in the response on the right to Wright Allen’s ruling. “I hate to use the words ‘conservative viewpoint,’ but it’s a reactionary viewpoint.”

Cohen also tried — but failed — to decriminalize homosexuality in Virginia. The Supreme Court finally did what the legislature wouldn’t, ruling in a 2003 Texas case. The response in Richmond was similar to that in other state capitals after the court decision in Loving: If only out of symbolic defiance, there was little interest in erasing a legally unenforceable law. 

The fight for same-sex marriage, he said, requires a similar approach: “Just keep at it; don’t relent.”

The next time you see Victoria Cobb or Bob Marshall shrieking about same sex marriage, picture them in white KKK robes because that is the legacy they represent.  Like the KKK they use religion to perpetuate evil.
 

Virginian Pilot: Moving Virginia to the Right Side of History

While Christofascists and their political prostitutes in the Republican Party of Virginia continue to convulse and launch spittle flecked rants over last week's ruling that struck down Virginia's religious and anti-gay animus based Marshall-Newman Amendment, the Virginian Pilot editorial board recognizes the ruling for what it is: as step in moving Virginia to the right side of history.  In an editorial the paper praises the ruling as avoiding the repeated of Virginia on school desegregation, interracial marriage and gender based admission to state higher education institutions, all of which were steadfastly and wrongheadedly defended until abolished by the U.S. Supreme Court. Sadly, too many editorial writers refuse to see this truth.  Here are column excerpts:

Every argument advanced in support of Virginia's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage failed in federal court.

U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen's decision, released late Thursday, reveals the law for what it is: codified discrimination.

"The goal and the result of this legislation is to deprive Virginia's gay and lesbian citizens of the opportunity and right to choose to celebrate, in marriage, a loving, rewarding, monogamous relationship with a partner to whom they are committed for life," Wright Allen wrote. "These results occur without furthering any legitimate state purpose."

Because of that, the ban is unconstitutional, she ruled.

Her ruling - which doesn't take effect pending an appeal - shifts Virginia to the right side of history. The commonwealth became the first state in the Southeast to see its same-sex marriage ban fall.

 

Our nation must eradicate such discriminatory laws from every state. An appeal in Virginia's case could provide the catalyst that the highest court needs.

Arguments that the state's ban on same sex-marriage has protected children failed on two levels.

"Of course the welfare of our children is a legitimate state interest," the judge wrote. "However, limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples fails to further this interest. Instead, needlessly stigmatizing and humiliating children who are being raised by the loving couples targeted by Virginia's Marriage Laws betrays that interest." Those children are "needlessly deprived of the protection, the stability, the recognition and the legitimacy that marriage conveys."

Too often in our history, Virginia has clung to prejudice and discrimination: It defended segregation. It fought to preserve its ban on interracial marriages. It tried to prevent women from attending state-supported Virginia Military Institute.

Wright Allen singled out former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli for perpetuating discrimination when he said state colleges and universities could not offer "protections that had been in place regarding 'sexual orientation,' 'gender identity,' and 'gender expression.' "

Virginia can, finally, now be the force for change.  Marriage must be equal for same-sex couples under the law. With Thursday's ruling, this nation is one step closer to recognizing that truth.

 It is noteworthy that with every one of Virginia's past mistakes, it was the same "godly folk" now shrieking over Thursday's ruling that supported segregation, bans on interracial marriage and gender discrimination.  When is the larger public going to see them for the foul individuals that they are?