Now the Supreme Court has actually taken such a step and in the course of doing so has given credence to the analogy between same-sex marriage and interracial marriage. This argument will be employed to discredit and demonize those who dissent, those who do not want to cooperate in a distortion of the meaning of marriage. Such dissenters, we will be told, are no different from and no better than the bigots of yesteryear who railed against mixed race marriages. There is, however, no reason at all for the defenders of marriage to submit tamely to the fate that the left has planned for them. They have a right, and indeed a duty, to continue to defend marriage as a union between a man and a woman, with a view to correcting an error widespread in our country, and even with a view, someday, to securing a reversal of the Supreme Court’s decision. They also have a right and a duty to defend themselves from the left’s plans- already triumphantly announced-to use antidiscrimination law to force moral traditionalists to be complicit in unions that they cannot, in conscience, regard as true marriages. It is therefore necessary for the defenders of marriage to explode the bogus charge that their efforts have anything in common with past objections to interracial marriage. There is an important distinction between the motives of the opponents of interracial marriage and those of the opponents of same-sex marriage: There never was, nor could there have been, a movement in America that opposed interracial marriage as an attack on the meaning of marriage. Put another way, the racists and segregationists of the past did not-unlike today’s opponents of same-sex marriage-present themselves as defenders of the integrity of marriage itself. On the contrary, racists who objected to interracial marriages were perfectly aware-and indeed fearful-of the fact that interracial marriages would be real marriages, that they could generate and nurture new human lives.Įveryone knew, for example, that a black man and a white woman, or a white man and a black woman, could generate mixed-race children. This is why anti-miscegenation laws did not merely decline to recognize interracial marriages but actually sought to punish them.
The people who wrote those laws knew that such unions really were marriages, that they would by their nature tend to achieve the ends of marriage: the generation and rearing of new members of the human race. Interracial marriages had to be deterred not because the racist thought marriages across the races were impossible, but rather precisely because he knew they were possible. Viewed in this light, the defenders of traditional marriage and the opponents of interracial marriage are animated not just by different but by actually opposite motives.
The former object to same-sex marriage because they know such a union could not be a marriage: a union that is in principle capable of the generation of human life. The latter objected to interracial marriages precisely because they knew that they could function as marriages thus understood.
Unlike today’s defenders of marriage, then, the opponents of interracial marriage were not at all interested in defending the integrity of marriage as it had always been understood. They were interested, instead, in something completely different and totally unrelated: the preservation of racial purity and the maintenance of white supremacy. This is why there was never a significant American movement against, and only against, interracial marriage. Objections to mixed race marriages were part of a larger movement to keep blacks in a socially and politically inferior position-to defend segregation in education and in all public services, as well as effectively to deprive blacks of the right to vote.