All the rage on Twitter, in blogs and in the news is the question of marriage…..most notably that of same sex marriage. But all this back and forth, the proclamations of doom and the sheer amount of lunacy around the subject.
I have not posted much on this for this is none of my business who a person marries……it is a commitment by two people to each other……and in that it is a personal and a private decision that NO one should have a say other than the two people.
Have I made myself clear?
But the subject of marriage peaked my interests and I did some surfing in the more radical, looney tunes Right wing blogs on the subject……I just wanted to see just how ignorant these morons can be.
I eventually found a subject that I felt passionate about….interracial marriage and how it was at one time illegal in certain states, most of whom were in the South.
But first a little background…..I am a product of an interracial marriage…..my father was white and mother was Native American, Apache to be exact. My daughter is the product of an interracial marriage……her mother is Thai.
With all that said I will continue this thought……when I was working for the state housing authority we were always dealing with people of interracial marriages and at one point one of my co-workers and and with a little participation from a couple of other workers were talking about this situation…..my co-worker was against it because he said it was difficult to decide which culture the child should be raised in…….I let him talk and quote the Bible (I guess) and then I said that is would be a simple decision. He looked at me roughly and said how so?
I would raise my interracial child as an American.
The debate ended about there.
Okay all that background stuff out of the way……I found a site where these people were almost violently opposed to interracial marriage…..they want to go back to the days of Jim Crow….one even quoted the judge in the Living v Virginia…..a mixed race couple that were being persecuted for being married……
At the age of 18, Mildred became pregnant, and in June 1958 the couple traveled to Washington, D.C. to marry, thereby evading Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made interracial marriage a crime. They returned to the small town of Central Point, Virginia. Based on an anonymous tip,[8] local police raided their home at night, hoping to find them having sex, which was also a crime according to Virginia law. When the officers found the Lovings sleeping in their bed, Mildred pointed out their marriage certificate on the bedroom wall. That certificate became the evidence for the criminal charge of “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth” that was brought against them.
The Lovings were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section 20-59, which classified miscegenation as a felony, punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five years. The trial judge in the case, Leon M. Bazile, echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach‘s 18th-century interpretation of race, wrote:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. They did so, moving to the District of Columbia.
The site I was on was this old fart racist that said that the judge’s statement should be the RULE of the land……of course I could not let that go without voicing an opinion……
I explained to him my ancestry and said……If we are to live by that statement then it is time for…..ALL YOU HONKIES GO HOME!
I await his reply.
