Why Same-Sex Marriage Is Not Like Interracial Marriage

Advocates of same-sex marriage often justify their radical position by claiming that homosexual matrimony is akin to interracial marriage. Frank Beckwith explains why the analogy fails :

While doing research for an academic paper on the topic of same-sex marriage and political liberalism, I was struck by how many authors, including judges, draw an analogy between bans on interracial marriage and the present law in almost every state in the United States that recognizes marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

The court cases most frequently cited by these writers are Loving v. Virginia (1967), the U. S. Supreme Court case that declared interracial marriage bans unconstitutional, and Perez v. Sharp (1948), a California Supreme Court case that did the same in relation to its state constitution.

[ . . . ]

Although the focus of my paper is not this analogy, the ubiquitous use of it in the literature, including some very important court cases, piqued my curiosity. What I discovered astounded me.

I learned that “at common law there was no ban on interracial marriage.” What does that mean? It means that anti-miscegenation laws were not part of the jurisprudence that American law inherited from the English courts. Anti-miscegenation laws were statutory in America (though never in England), first appearing in Maryland in 1661 after the institution of the enslavement of Africans on American soil. This means that interracial marriage was a common-law liberty that can only be overturned by legislation.

Read the rest to see why “anti-miscegenation supporters were very much like contemporary same-sex marriage proponents.”