Howard University School of Law
The Howard University School of Law is one of the oldest law schools in the country and the oldest law school at any historically black college or university (HBCU). Its Civil Rights Clinic has filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8 by highlighting how all of the arguments against same-sex marriage equality are simply recycled variations on arguments that were used to justify prohibitions of interracial marriage until Loving v. Virginia was decided in 1967 (citations omitted):
In the Jim Crow era, the denial of marriage rights to interracial couples served as one of the most potent symbols of the less-than-equal status of African-Americans. As recently as 1967, sixteen states still had anti-miscegenation statutes on their books; the last such statute was not officially repealed until 2000. Opponents of interracial marriage justified criminal prohibitions against such unions by pointing to the purported detrimental effect of interracial births and parentage, the supposed destruction of society if people marry between the races, and the so-called natural law rationale for keeping the races separate.
While public debate over interracial unions has generally died since Loving v. Virginia, today the opposition to marriage for same-sex couples relies on arguments strikingly similar to those raised in opposition to interracial marriage. Without acknowledging the racial provenance of these discredited arguments, opponents of marriage equality have attacked same-sex couples as a threat to American society, American families and heterosexual marriage, as an affront to the laws of God and nature, and as a menace to their children.
The brief goes on to highlight five distinct arguments that transcend the debates between marriage equality for interracial couples and marriage equality for same-sex couples:
- SOCIAL ORDER: Marriage equality is a threat to the social order and would “introduce a form of pollution to marriage.”
- SEXUALIZATION: The people who want to get married have relationships that are purely sexual, promiscuous, and “deviant.”
- PSEUDOSCIENCE: Researchers have distorted research to raise fears about supposed consequences of marriage equality.
- JUDEO-CHRISTIAN VALUES: The Bible forbids recognizing these relationships.
- CHILDREN: These relationships will cause physical and psychological damage to the children they raise.
The similarities are jarring, and Howard provides plenty of examples for each to demonstrate just how unoriginal the arguments against same-sex marriage truly are. The brief concludes with this stirring rebuke of equality’s opponents, including a quote from gay black poet James Baldwin:
But the certainty and monotony with which some will always sound the death knell for society, morality, and faith, just because two adults choose to marry, cannot obscure the reality that we heard virtually the same arguments for almost three hundred years to justify preventing two black people from marrying and then a black man from marrying a white woman. Nor, when all is said and done, can these jeremiads about how marriage equality for same-sex couples will lead to our final slouching toward Gomorrah obscure the reality that it is “an inexorable law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own.”
(HT: Kathleen Perrin.)
I, along with what seems like every other television critic in America, have been greatly enjoying seeing Happy Endings hit its stride this fall (especially paired with Revenge, it makes for a nice comedy-drama macaron). But I’m finding myself wishing that the show would take a bit more advantage of making Brad (Damon Wayans, Jr.) and Jane (Eliza Coupe) an interracial couple to actually talk a bit about race. I’d be really curious to hear them talk about how they want to raise their kids and what it will mean for them to be biracial instead of having their visit to suburbia be about breakfast-themed Halloween costumes and the perils of that particular holiday. And the show seems inclined to give them wacky marriage strains and fixes like weirdly peppy sorority sisters and improv obsessions, rather than finding a defining approach to more naturally occurring material. The show tends to bring up race more in the interacts between Brad and his friends — in the last episode, Dave kept posing at blackness and kept getting shot down by Brad. But while the episode did a nice job of shooting down Dave’s dorkiness, the show didn’t really have Brad say anything about what Dave’s attempts at bonding meant to him, or why they didn’t work, or why they were inauthentic. It felt like an incomplete moment, particularly since these guys are supposed to be close.
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