39 years ago, in June of 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the final laws against miscegenation. Do you know what miscegenation means? It’s a fifty-cent word that actually stands for interracial marriage. I was thinking about this the other day and started doing some research as Sherry and I posted our viewpoints on the hot-button issue of legislating marriage and what the definition of marriage should be and whether or not the government should issue laws about who can and can’t get married.
39 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court got into the tango of the marriage debate to overturn 16 state’s laws that banned interracial marriage. In fact, interracial marriage was so abhorrent that the idea of a black woman and a white man or a white woman and a black man was considered aberrant and repugnant. It was so against the grain that more that 16 states had laws on their books expressly forbidding interracial unions to be legal.
How Far We Have Come
It’s hard to imagine that world, those laws were struck down five years before I was born. Were they a direct result of the civil rights movement? Had we finally stepped out of the shadow of our past oppression and opinions that one race was superior to another? Was it a result of the ethnic cleansing that the Nazis were selling and pushing during their reign of terror during World War II? Was it simply that a progressive court found it abhorrent and unconstitutional for the states to legislate choice?
That’s really open for interpretation and probably delving into areas that I am not qualified to argue about. Still, it seems rather interesting because there were numerous tantrums, editorials and screaming fits from various factions that legalizing interracial marriage would destroy the institution of marriage – it would tarnish it and society would be debased.
I suppose it’s open to interpretation but I don’t see our country being harmed by interracial marriage and I don’t see the state of marriage as having been debased or lessened. If anything, I think marriage and the abandonment of legal adversity to interracial marriages has helped to heal some of the gaps between races and the opinions thereof.
So What Is My Point?
None really, consider this a post of observation that 39 years ago this month we marked the end of laws against interracial marriage in the same month that several states are contemplating legislation against gay marriage and the United States Congress debated marriage legislation that would set a definition precluding same-sex unions. No matter where you stand on the issue, there is definite irony here.
With more than a generation between the strike down of the miscegenation laws, can you imagine interracial marriage being illegal?