In my last dairy I said I would be releasing a series of diaries in order to redefine what the issue of gay marriage is. I would like to introduce my first big works toward this project by looking at another issue of marriage. That issue was interracial marriage. When we look closer at this issue we see the same hate that is happening now. I open with Lisa L. Greene's words about Gay marriage in the washingtonpost on January 1, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40034-2004Dec31.html
But Greene, an African American, said she's motivated to prohibit same-sex marriage in the District because gay marriage threatens African Americans. Greene told the Blade: "As an African American, I feel it's important to preserve the family. Statistics show African Americans have the nation's highest rate of out-of-marriage births."
Now let's take a look at another type of marriage that has been threatening the culture of life.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_1_55/ai_57046411#continue
Almost anywhere you go these days, you will encounter mixed-race couples: at the grocery store, the mall, the theater, at a company function, at: a concert, even at church. And while for years the Black man-White woman couple was more prevalent, today many social observers say that the pairing of Black women and White men is just as common.
.......
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1997 there were 311,000 interracial (Black-White) married couples, more than six times as many as in 1960. Of those, 201,000 were comprised of a Black husband and White wife, while there were 110,000 couples in which the husband was White and the wife Black. Some estimate that today 10 percent of married Black men have mates of another race.
Some social observers say that the increase in cross-cultural relationships is tied directly to the breakdown of school and residential segregation and the 1967 overthrow of the last laws. That year the U.S. Supreme Court unconstitutional laws barring racial intermarriage in states. A mixed couple in Virginia had challenged the state's 1924 antimiscegenation statute in response to their being forced by local law officials to live apart, to jail or leave the state.
In addition, most grade schools and colleges are integrated, and so are workplaces and neighborhoods. Many middle-class Black kids grow up in affluent White areas and socialize with White kids from kindergarten on. When they adolescent and teen years, they naturally are attracted to those within the same social circles in which they and in which they are comfortable.
If we look through history we will find shining examples of hate pushed upon the word of marriage, but is this really about marriage between a man/man or woman/woman?
http://slate.msn.com/id/30352/
June 15, 1999
Last week, the Alabama Senate voted to repeal the state's constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage, 32 years after the Supreme Court struck down Virginia's similar ban. Hadn't these archaic laws gone out with Bull Connor? I asked myself as I read the news account. And haven't we been hearing that America has rediscovered the melting pot, that in another generation or two we'll all be "cablinasian," like Tiger Woods?
I talked to the measure's main sponsor, state Rep. Alvin Holmes, a 24-year statehouse veteran who has been trying to overturn the ban for decades. "The last time I tried was about three years ago," said Holmes. "It didn't get out of committee." Holmes credits his success to the last election, in which a bevy of Democrats were swept into office.
Holmes wasn't just tidying up the legal code. In parts of rural Alabama, he said, probate judges still refuse to issue marriage licenses to interracial couples. Holmes explained that some of his Alabama colleagues opposed his measure because they willfully refused to accept that the federal government had the power to override state law--an ideology of states' rights that goes way beyond Newt Gingrich to John Calhoun.
When you think about it, it makes sense that some Alabamians found it hard to jettison overnight a 300-year-old custom. Laws against interracial marriage--and the taboos against black-white sex that they codify--have been the central weapon in the oppression of African-Americans since the dawn of slavery. President Abraham Lincoln's detractors charged him in the 1864 presidential campaign with promoting the mongrelization of the races (that's where the coinage "miscegenation," which now sounds racist, comes from). Enemies of the 20th-century civil rights movement predicted that the repeal of Jim Crow laws would, as one Alabama state senator put it, "open the bedroom doors of our white women to black men." Fears of black sexuality have been responsible for some of the most notorious incidents of anti-black violence and persecution, from the Scottsboro Boys to Emmett Till.
This issue isn't about gay marriage, but the issue of hate, the unknown, and unwilling ability to change one's views. Let's take a look at the Christian Right's view on interracial marriage.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/032605Seesholtz/032605seesholtz.html
As for Ms. LaRue's concern about the "will of the people," a year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down faith-based laws against interracial marriage and ruled that marriage is "one of the basic civil rights of man" and the freedom to marry is "essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness" (Loving v. Virginia), a Gallup poll showed 72 percent of Americans opposed the legalization of interracial marriage. Those American voters were wrong. Perhaps that's why the Founding Fathers believed in checks and balances, and why they placed so much faith in the courts to adjudicate their intent: liberty, justice and equality for all American citizens regardless of current religious "truths" and political trends.
The evangelical Christian Right damned Judge Kramer and his decision as "irrational" and "crazy," but the remarks of Randy Thomasson, spokesman for the Sacramento-based Campaign for Children and Families, went much further. That someone representing an organization called "Campaign for Children and Families" would make such vile, hateful remarks should be cause for concern. Because he disagreed with the court's decision, Thomasson called Judge Kramer a "twisted . . . arrogant judge" who "hates marriage and the voters." How's that for hysterical irrationality?
But the CCF spokesman wasn't done. He also had this to say: "This is not an equal protection case. . . . Every adult Californian already has equal access to marriage as proved by law, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Instead, this actually is the establishment of a completely new privilege that never existed before."
As you can see the hate is still there and lives on. Even now we allow our nation to be defined by hate. I ask you what is a Civil right?
http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Civil_rights
Civil rights or positive rights are those legal rights retained by citizens and protected by the government. Examples include the right to vote and anti-discrimination laws. Civil rights movements usually want equal protection of the laws for minorities, as well as new laws outlawing discrimination and its vestiges. Civil rights effectively upholds the values of positive liberty.
What is a Human Right?
http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/human_right
Human rights (natural rights) are rights which some hold to be "inalienable" and belonging to all humans, according to natural law. Such rights are believed, by proponents, to be necessary for freedom and the maintenance of a "reasonable" quality of life.
If a right is inalienable, that means it cannot be bestowed, granted, limited, bartered away, or sold away (e.g., one cannot sell oneself into slavery). The issue of which rights are inalienable and which are not (or whether any rights are inalienable rather than granted or bestowed) is an ancient and ongoing controversy. Rights may also be non-derogable (not limited in times of National Emergency) - these often include the right to life, the right to be prosecuted only according to the laws that are in existence at the time of the offence, the right to be free from slavery, and the right to be free from torture.