From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/24/marriage-equality-civil-rights-inheritance
On the face of it, mixed-race and same-sex marriage rights are quite different. But look at who's lined up in opposition and why
guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 February 2012
In the small hours of 11 July 1958, three policemen entered the home of Mildred and Richard Loving, in Central Point, Virginia and found them in bed. When Richard pointed to his marriage certificate indicating that Mildred was his wife, they arrested them. Richard was white; Mildred was black and Cherokee. They were breaking the law, as laid down in Virginia's Racial Integrity Act, which banned mixed-race marriage.
The case eventually went to the US supreme court, which, in 1967, ruled in favour of the Lovings:
"Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man', fundamental to our very existence and survival. 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."
So, six years after Barack Obama was born in Hawaii to a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, mixed-race marriage was formally recognised as a civil right nationwide. (Some states kept their laws on the books, even if they were unenforceable. Alabama was the last to get rid of its anti-miscegenation law in 2000.) Said Mildred, many years later:
"Not a day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me. Even if others thought he was the 'wrong kind of person' for me to marry."
Recently, a report by the Pew Research Center revealed that more than one in seven new marriages in the US is between people of a different race or ethnicity. The research revealed mixed-marriages now comprise 8.4% of all marriages in the US in 2010, more than double the proportion of 1980.
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