Loving v. Virginia - Words Matter!
Posted on May 17th, 2008 by MoverMike
The Oregonian is “thrilled” by the California court’s decision to allow same sex marriage. In Tossing a bouquet to gay couples, the paper writes
Echoing the California Supreme Court’s landmark decision 60 years ago striking down bans on interracial marriage, the court said its ruling this week wasn’t about discovering a new right to same-sex marriage, but an old right to marriage — period. The 1948 decision, the court noted, didn’t determine whites could marry blacks, but that people could marry other people — of their own choosing. (emphasis added)
The 1948 decision, Loving v. Virginia was
a landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court declared Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute, the “Racial Integrity Act of 1924″, unconstitutional, thereby overturning Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.
As I read the words written about that decision, the judges didn’t say that at all. They did say
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. (emphasis added)
Sure you may use Loving v. Virginia to justify marriage for gay and lesbian couples, but when you apply “fundamental to our very existence and survival”, it is a quite hard to imagine a gay or lesbian couple procreating.
That’s the nub for conservatives. Marriage is for survival of the species. Partnerships and unions are not subversive of the idea (of sharing lives together and being monogamous) and are easily accomodated. As Obama says, “Words Matter!”
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