Originally Posted by BgMc31
The same argument was used years ago when states overwhelming supported a ban on interracial marriage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws
Anti-miscegenation laws
Laws banning interracial marriage were enforced in several US states until 1967, in Nazi Germany and in South Africa during the Apartheid era.
[edit] United States
In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws were passed by individual states to prohibit miscegenation, nowadays more commonly referred to as interracial marriage. Although an Anti-Miscegenation Amendment was proposed in United States Congress in 1912 and 1913, [1] a nation-wide law against racially mixed marriages was never enacted. From the 19th century into the 1950s, most US states enforced anti-miscegenation laws. From 1913 to 1948, 30 out of the then 48 states did so. In 1967, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. With this ruling, these laws were no longer in effect in the remaining 17 states that at the time still enforced them.
The term miscegenation, a word invented by American journalists to discredit the Abolitionsit movement by stirring up debate over the prospect of white-black intermarriage after the abolition of slavery, was first coined in 1863. Yet in British North America laws banning the intermarriage of whites and blacks were enacted as far back as the late seventeenth century. During the colonial era, Virginia (1691) was the first colony in British North America to pass a law forbidding free blacks and whites to intermarry. This was the first time in world history that a law was invented that restricted access to marriage partners solely on the basis of "race", not class or servitude. [2]
In the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century, many American states passed anti-miscegenation laws, which were often defended by invoking controversial interpretations of the Bible, particularly the story of Phinehas. Typically defining miscegenation as a felony, these laws prohibited the solemnization of weddings between persons of different races and prohibited the officiating of such ceremonies. Sometimes the individuals attempting to marry would not be held guilty of miscegenation itself, but felony charges of adultery or fornication would be brought against them instead.
While this aspect of the U.S. history is often discussed in the context of the South, many northern states had anti-miscegenation as well. In 1776, 12 out of the Thirteen Colonies that declared their in***endence enforced laws against interracial marriage. Some of these laws were repealed after in***endence. However, later the new slave states as well many new free states such such as Illinois[1] and California[2]. A number of northern and western states repealed them during the nineteenth century. This, however, did little to halt anti-miscegenation sentiments in the rest of the country. Newly established western states continued to enact laws banning interracial marriage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Between 1913 and 1948, 30 out of the then 48 states enforced anti-miscegenation laws. [3] Only Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Alaska, Hawaii, and the federal District of Columbia never enacted them.
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Originally Posted by kfrost06
after it. Apparently that offended you. If so I apologize.
