Are They Really The Same?

Are opponents of same-sex marriage really like opponents of interracial marriage of 50 years ago? Let's take a look at some of the most common objections to same-sex marriage.

Same-sex marriage is unnatural

Here, for example, is the declaration that the Supreme Court of Virginia used to invalidate a marriage between a black man and a white woman in 1878:

The purity of public morals," the court declared, "the moral and physical development of both races….require that they should be kept distinct and separate… that connections and alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them, should be prohibited by positive law, and be subject to no evasion.

As the New York Times (Feb. 23, 1911, p. 23) phrased it: The “white and black races should live apart. Their hybridization forms a degenerate type; anthropologists declare that some of the most cruel and treacherous specimens of humanity are to be found among “mottled” negroes.”

A Georgia court wrote that such unions are “not only unnatural, but … always productive of deplorable results,” such as increased effeminate behavior in the population. “They are productive of evil, and evil only, without any corresponding good … (in accordance with) the God of nature.”

Same-sex marriage is contrary to God and unBiblical

The trial judge who convicted the Lovings of illegal interracial marriage 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.

This attitude was wide-spread among Christians. As recently as 1980  R. J. Rushdoony reiterated the Biblical argument against interracial marriage:

The burden of the law is thus against inter-religious, inter-racial, and inter-cultural marriages, in that they normally go against the very community which marriage is designed to establish.

And even today, 16% of evangelicals continue to oppose interracial marriage.

Same-sex marriage is against the traditional definition of marriage

Allowing interracial marriages “necessarily involves the degradation” of conventional marriage, an institution that “deserves admiration rather than execration.”
(Source: A U.S. representative from Georgia quoted in Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1996)

Same-sex marriage is a slippery slope   


R. D. McIlwaine, arguing against interracial marriage in the Loving case, made a slippery-slope argument, too:

It is clear from the most recent available evidence on the psycho-sociological aspect of this question that intermarried families are subjected to much greater pressures and problems then those of the intermarried and that the state's prohibition of interracial marriage for this reason stands on the same footing as the prohibition of polygamous marriage, or incestuous marriage or the prescription of minimum ages at which people may marry and the prevention of the marriage of people who are mentally incompetent.

Think of the children!

It is contended that interracial marriage has adverse effects not only upon
the parties thereto but upon their progeny . . . and that the progeny of a
marriage between a Negro and a Caucasian suffer not only the stigma of such
inferiority but the fear of rejection by members of both races.

(Source: Perez v. Lippold, 198 P.2d at 26 and n.5 (summarizing the State's
argument in favor of ban on interracial marriage)) 

A host of other arguments

So, yes - really the same arguments all over again. Haven't we learned anything from our history?
 

The New Civil Rights Era

Robert Cargill hits the nail on the head.