Saturday, August 14, 2010

Supreme Court's Ruling On Interracial Marriage And How It Relates To Gay Marriages

Anti-miscegenation laws have been deemed unconstitutional for over 50 years, since the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia ruled that the Virginia statute violated the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In it's decision, the court wrote the following:
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.
The Supreme Court had concluded that anti-miscegenation laws were racist and had been enacted to perpetuate white supremacy:
There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.
All you have to do is replace every mention of race with sexual preference and you have the same exact situation playing in California right now - proponents of Proposition 8, who wish to restrict marriage to straight couples, are doing so to maintain heterosexual supremacy and to deprive homosexuals of the equality under the law.

I have heard comparisons to interracial marriage before but felt posting the court's ruling would be more effective...

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