I'm a multiracial woman, of primarily African descent and I an VERY happily

[Ecumenist]

Last edited Sat Jan 7, 2012, 01:34 AM - Edit history (1)

married to a Texan of Bohemian Czech heritage and I am VERY concerned about the denial of marriage right to Gay people. Why, you might ask? Because the same people who who are gay bigots and are so much against Gays getting married are usually the same ones who are against "interracial" marriage. When the election here in California eliminated the right for Gays to marry here, my very Catholic Uncle voted no because he said it was a slippery slide and it was just one step away from making marriages like mine illegal.

My marriage was illegal in California until 1972, ( anti-miscegenation laws are crazy as hell), so, it's not unimaginable that it could happen again. As far as I'm concerned, there's no real difference between mixed marriages and gay marriages to certain types. In fact,some of haters who seem to be so concerned about what gay folks do in their bedrooms, hate people like me even more and interracial marriages send them into orbit.

I've always wondered why we use the term "Interracial", seeing as we are all Homo Sapiens sapiens, not Homo Sapiens africanus, Homo sapiens asiaticus or Homo Sapiens europeanus, etc. We have different skin colours but we are all human, (unless there are folks walking around out there from another planet...who knows?). Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to reproduce and have offspring that are fertile on a regular basis. Besides, we deserve the right to choose the mate who is the best for us.

The funniest thing is that alot of bigots "Play" with the people they campaign against so furiously...Think Ted Haggard, Strom Thurman, Eddie Long. Hell, I am, (and the vast majority of African American people),are ethnically who we are because of mixing of the slave holders taking black concubines. Some Slavemasters purposely impregnated black women for the purpose of producing babies who would command a higher price on the slave market.

I cannot and will never understand how people can vote to take away the rights of one group without considering that their vote is making it easier for their rights being taken away. If you give an inch, they'll take a mile. I'm just waiting to hear someone start talking about reversing Loving vs Virgina. After all, these freaks are trying to take away the right to be able to obtain a legal and safe abortion, that hot ass mess Santorum is actually espousing making birth control ILLEGAL! That idiot actually thought he made sense by singling out black folks by saying that he wouldn't give money to those of us who receive welfare benefits. Apparently, he wasn't aware that we are less than 13 % of the population.

So, I guess I'm saying that a storm is brewing and I am just waiting to hear one of these bigotted idiots say that my marriage is illegal. Of the people that got married the same year I did, our marriage is the only one that is ROCK SOLID and full of love. We underwent a test of fire ,( I was diagnosed with cervical cancer stage 4) and wasn't supposed to make it, first throught the night then to March of last year...I'm still here and kicking. We became even closer and I'll be damned if someone is going to tell me I can't be married to my boo.

To my Gay sisters and Brothers, I'm fighting for you and your fundamental human right to love whoever you choose. More Black people voted against the mormon backed Prop 8 than you know or was reported. When it comes right down to it, there not much difference between you and I.

[safeinOhio]

1. Great post.

Hope you stay here and kicking for a long, long time.

[Ecumenist]

2. Thank you, SafeInOhio, I plan on attending the funerals of the doctors

who told me I would be dead. I'm going to make sure I'm cute too. LOL!! I ain't going anywhere anytime soon.

[joshcryer]

3. Nice post Ecumenist, and a happy rec from me. Shame this sank like it did.

Keep up the good fight!

[Ecumenist]

4. Thank you JonCryer...I'm doing everything I can to fight the Beast.

So far, so good.

[Starry Messenger]

5. k&r

Beautiful post. And kudos to kicking cancer's ass.

[Ecumenist]

8. Aw, Thanks Starry Messenger...

I'm still working on getting rid of this beast but considering where I started with the stage 4 cervical cancer and internal gangrene, I' doing pretty good! I plan on being with my baby for at least 40 years further.

[Jamastiene]

6. Great post!

[Ecumenist]

9. Thanks Jamastiene

[RainDog]

7. great post!

and glad to hear you came through you illness.

hugs to you and yours.

[Ecumenist]

11. Aw, see "you dun made me cry"...

Thank so very much

[unionworks]

10. K&R! n/t

[rox63]

12. Wonderful post!

K&R!

[pampango]

13. Great post. Conservatives love to keep "us" and "them" apart.

They use a variety of means to define "us vs. them" - race, sexual orientation, gender, nationality, ethnicity and others to keep us from marrying, hiring, buying from/selling to, going to school with or providing government services to everyone.

But they seem to believe that "divide and conquer" is a tried and true strategy.

[Ecumenist]

72. Ain't it the truth.

they consider you their friend as long as their child, sibling doesn't fall in love with you. Happened to my cousin. His wife(now), family loved him UNTIL they started seeing one another. Then he became "the nigger". BTW, her father was a MINISTER.

[Quantess]

14. Wonderful post!

I myself have no compelling reason to support gay marriage, other than fairness. I'm white & hetero, and I support gay marriage too.

[Puzzledtraveller]

15. I have a co-worker

Interracial couple, he and his wife are huge Ron Paul fanatics, leaves me scratching my head.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

16. I only have one disagreement with this..

We're all actually Homo Sapiens Sapiens

k & r

[Ecumenist]

68. You're right, Viva_La_Revolution...As a bio major, I shouldn't have

made that mistake.

[Aerows]

17. What a beautiful post

I am glad that your health is still with you, despite the challenges to it you are facing. The love you share with your husband has no doubt kept you strong, and it is truly a beautiful thing.

As a gay woman, I agree with you that it is the same fight. If they strip one person of their rights, they will strip someone else of theirs, too. First they come for abortion, then they come for birth control. First they come for gay marriage, then they come for inter-racial marriage. I don't understand why people don't see this.

This relentless attempt to turn our country into a theocracy is frightening. For people so damn scared of Sharia law, the evangelical right is awfully eager to enact it while calling it "Christianity". There is more than a passing resemblance between fundamental Islam and fundamental Christianity.

You are very right, Ecumenist, that we need to be vigilant against attempts to invalidate marriages, because first it will be legal gay marriages, then it will be your own. The "purity" tests from the hard right never stop, and to the right-wing, no one that isn't hard right is ever pure enough.

[msanthrope]

18. K&R. Someday, the opponents of gay marriage will realize they are on the wrong side of

the tide of history. It will happen...slowly, we shed the inequality deliberately put into law.

[EFerrari]

19. I don't understand how your marriage could be illegal until 1972.

Could you clarify that please?

[justiceischeap]

22. Some states didn't take their state laws off the books until after the Loving V. Virginia case

For example, Alabama was the last state to remove it's law from the books and that was in 2000 and 40% of the folks voted against taking the law off the books.

[Betty Karlson]

23. Interracial marriages were illegal in her state until 1972.

One of the last legal remnants of the "separate but equal" mentality that racists found so appealing.

A black man trying to marry a white woman could be charged with abduction, attempted rape, and what not, just for loving her. Horrendous. A black woman could be charged with prostitution for trying to marry a white man. Unbelievable.

It has now been passed on to the homophobes (DOMA), who also believe that separate is equal enough.

[EFerrari]

24. Not in CA that I know of.

Afaik, that ended in the 40s. My aunt was in a mixed race marriage in 1950s. That's why I asked, because maybe I've misunderstood.

[Gormy Cuss]

27. Your memory is right..

Perez v. Sharp (1948) changed the law in CA.
Regardless, Loving v. Virginia would have invalidated it in 1967. I'm trying to remember what race-based laws changed in 1972.

eta: I completely agree with Ecumenist though -- there are some conservatives in this country who would support the return of anti-miscegenation laws.

[EFerrari]

35. None that I can find. The last ones were repealed in 1967.

But of course you both are right. There are knuckle draggers in this country that will never accept emancipation, let alone integration or the freedom to marry.

[Betty Karlson]

57. I guess then that she was not in California at the time

From the year, 1972, we can derive that she meant the state of Georgia:

Quote: "Georgia took five years to repeal the anti-miscegenation statutes from its books, in 1972. However, while indeed the reaction to Loving was muted in Georgia as well as the other Southern states normally associated with racist tendencies, Georgia nonetheless did have a few instances where the state refused to comply with the order and refused to issue marriage licenses to interracial couples.
"One such incident was noted in a New York Times May 21, 1971 article, where the Justice Department filed a suit against the state of Georgia and a county official, H.W. Roberts, for refusing to issue a marriage license to white Army lieutenant John Ray Sanford (at Fort Benning, Georgia) and his black fiancée, Betty Byrom of Mountain View, Georgia. The United States District Court in Atlanta issued a temporary restraining order against Roberts and forced him to grant the license. This incident does suggest that while the 1967 decision had immediate repercussions in some of the Northern states, and especially Virginia, Georgia still lumbered to its reality and county officials still often used their personal discretion in refusing to grant marriage licenses.
"They were, however, normally forced to do so once the federal courts got involved. The other interesting observation was that Georgia did not immediately remove the anti-miscegenation statutes from its books until five years after the 1967 decision, when Virginia had done so in 1968 and West Virginia, Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri in 1969. Although Georgia could not actively enforce its anti-miscegenation statutes during that time, the delay is significant in representing Georgians’ belief that white-black marriages and sexual relations were not natural. That perhaps was the reason why the Justice Department had to offer respite to interracial couples quite often, especially during those five years in between from 1967 to 1972, as the 1971 case indicates. Although enforceability had been dismantled, the simmering ideology underneath was too potent for jurisdiction to completely eradicate."

More on Georgia at this link: http://mgagnon.myweb.uga.edu/students/3090/05FA3090-Paul.htm

[EFerrari]

62. I think I finally get it.

Misecegenation laws were themselves illegal in Federal law by 1967. But, there were @ssholes around the country that chose to illegally disregard that. So, while the marriage was probably not illegal, there were still officials in CA, GA and in other places that kept behaving as if they were.

[Ecumenist]

67. As recently as the last 3 years, there was a couple here in California who were

Last edited Sat Jan 7, 2012, 01:40 AM - Edit history (1)

denied the right to get married in their church. The minister REFUSED to marry them. I'm still looking for the link. I remember reading the article with my mouth open.

[EFerrari]

70. Oh, I don't doubt it in the least. n/t

[loyalsister]

29. It was way worse than separate but equal

The marriage restriction laws came about during the Eugenics Movement- accompanied by forced sterilization laws.
They targeted Native Americans, African Americans, people with disabilities and some immigrants.
The plan was to sterilize as many as possible to keep them from reproducing with each other and marriage restrictions would keep them out of the "Nordic superior race" gene pool.
Of course, this twisted idea was exported to Germany which honored one of the American architects of this plan with an award.

[Ecumenist]

32. Wasn't that Henry Ford?

[loyalsister]

44. It was Harry Laughlin

"In 1936, the University of Heidelberg awarded Laughlin an honorary doctorate for his work in the science of “race hygiene.” He also was a member of the editorial boards of several German journals devoted to race hygiene. Western newspaper reports about the extensive application of compulsory sterilization in Germany began to appear in the late 1930s. By the beginning of the 1940s eugenics in the United States was largely discredited and more associated with fascism and primitive racism than credible science."

http://mulibraries.missouri.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/eugenics/laughlin.htm

"War Against The Weak" is a well research account of the Eugenics movement that documents the legislative initiatives within a cultural\historical analysis.

[Betty Karlson]

58. We should not try to brag about minorities' misery:

My misery was bigger than yours!, is not a constructive argument.

You may remember that gay men, too were chemically castrated at one point, were subjected to all kinds of creepy experiments, and so on.

Germany, in those mass-murdering years, even tried some forced lobotomy.

When I said "separate but equal" I meant that there were separate marriages for African-Americans and for Caucasians. But of course we all agree that such separation by its very nature means there was no equality. And I agree with you there were (for mixed couples) and are (for gay cuples) lots of devils in the details.

[loyalsister]

61. I wasn't claiming bragging rights

It was a historical reference to the origin of the laws that more of us would have been subject to than we realize.

[Betty Karlson]

75. Thanks for that clarification. n/t

[justiceischeap]

28. Maybe she didn't marry in CA. nt

[Ecumenist]

31. No, I didn't. Not that I had plannedit that way. My mother had a MAJOR

stroke two months before and we changed the plans to get married in South Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

[EFerrari]

33. Nevada's miscegenation laws were repealed in 1959.

Now I'm really confused.

[Ecumenist]

49. I didn't get married until 2001.

[Ecumenist]

51. Heck, I wasn't born until 1964, LOL!!

[Ecumenist]

38. The law wasn't removed from the books until 1972.

Apparently, even though the precedent had been set here in California in 1948, it was based on Asian/white marriages and as petty at it seems, I have heard and read about numerous cases of black/white couples, (admittedly most of them where black male/whitefemale), who were denied the right to marry here in California even after that law was passed. The actually law wasn't removed from the books until 1972.

[EFerrari]

42. Well, I've been all over the country

and while I've seen ugly incidents of discrimination just about all over, CA can match them any day of the week.

[Ecumenist]

52. Amen, EFerrari...I have to say that my own personal

experience, the most overt Racism I HAVE EVER faced was in Arizona. I was actually told, by someone who doubtless thought it was a complement, "you're so beautiful, you MUST HAVE WHITE BLOOD.."..WTF?? SMDH

[EFerrari]

53. Lmao, what is the MATTER with people.

My personal favorite is when someone asked my mom if she knew "Maria", as if we're in a club or something.

Followed closely by when my favorite teacher in grade school asked me "Are you SURE you aren't Italian?" because being EYEtalian is better than being Latino.

lol

In one place I lived in SoCal, the neighbors stopped talking to me after they heard me speak Spanish to my gardener. Not kidding.

Ah, California.

[Ecumenist]

54. It's the same with Black folks. I have been asked if I knew Tyrone ..Who the hell is Tyrone?

I have never known a Tyrone. I'm sure he's nice enough but I don't know him. Yeah, you belong to the the Latino version of the Club...The means that allows black people to instantly know another black person ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD, by virtue of a single first name...LOL!!!

I'm from Southern California originally too. I guess I'd be double terrible to your neighbors because I speak spanish too. Part of my mother's family comes from Andalucia Spain.

[Gormy Cuss]

43. Perez v. Sharp didn't involve an Asian/white couple.

Perez was Mexican-American and under CA law considered white. Her intended was an African-American.

Granted, the precedent didn't mean the problem disappeared overnight. I have no doubt that marriage license denials happened with some regularity before the Loving decision brought national visibility to such laws.

Thanks for clearing up the 1972 reference.

[Betty Karlson]

20. God bless you.

She wants us to fight for the repressed among Her children.

[justiceischeap]

21. Thanks for your support Ecumenist

I just want to point out to any naysayers that come along and read this post that 46% of Mississippi Republicans (http://bit.ly/y1MT4t) think it's okay to ban interracial marriage. In 2000, 40% of Alabamians thought is was okay (http://bit.ly/w7MmIT). In 2009, an interracial couple was denied a marriage license in Louisiana (http://bit.ly/xxjfwF).

[EFerrari]

36. I wonder how a poll like that would do in Silicon Valley.

This place was segregated well into the 70s and I bet if you look at public school enrollment, it probably still is for all purposes.

[justiceischeap]

37. While I was researching those links

I read that 1 in 4 people in the US are against interracial marriage (it was a Washington Post poll) but I couldn't find a link so didn't include that.

Gallup says 53% of Americans support the legalization of same-sex marriage which worries me when we finally do get a Republican president. They will ignore the will of the people on this subject to pander to their base.

[EFerrari]

39. Both parties routinely ignore popular opinion to pander to their funders.

On marriage equality, we've seen the Democrats lag far behind ours, no?

It's a different day than it used to be. We have to be ready to fight for what is right.

[justiceischeap]

41. Amen! nt

[bvar22]

25. Thank You! I STAND with you!

Beautifully written.

[font size=6]Equal Rights,
Equal Protections,
& Equal Opportunity for ALL.
NO exceptions![/font]




You will know them by their WORKS,
not by their Magical "Faith Based" excuses.
[font size=5 color=green][center]Solidarity99![/font][font size=2 color=green]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[/center]

[Nuclear Unicorn]

26. Laws should only be used

to keep bad people in check, not keep lovers apart.

[Spazito]

30. Excellent OP!

Truly excellent.

Recommended.

[Uncle Joe]

34. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Ecumenist.

[noiretextatique]

40. kudos to you, sis!

Last edited Thu Jan 5, 2012, 05:46 PM - Edit history (1)

for fighting that beast and surviving! breast cancer survivor here...and proud african-american lesbian. i wish you and your boo all the best...i am glad you found each other

one of my uncles married a white woman in the 50's. they had to travel in different cars when they visited the family home in mexia, texas. hatred is a form of insanity.

[Ecumenist]

46. Thank you NoirTextatique, I'm still fighting and will continue

God bless you and I wish you everything you hope and dream of in this New Year. I hope you have your own Boo and if not, may you be blessed with one soon, fast and in a hurry.

[noiretextatique]

47. thanks, Ecumenist

bless you, and you have a wonderful year also. and thanks for the boo wishes
holding you up in thought

[AverageJoe90]

74. The same to you.

And many more happy holidays after this. =)

[Blue Owl]

48. +1

K&R

[JNelson6563]

50. Excellent post Ecumenist.

Well said. I look forward to you being "here and kicking" for a long time to come and writing stuff as insightful as this.

Julie

[Ecumenist]

66. Thank you for your kind wishes...JNelson6563. I plan on being here for sometime to come

and writing to express my thoughts is my plan. God bless..

[gateley]

55. Brava! Beautiful post.

And I wish you continued good health and happiness.

[Ecumenist]

64. Thank you so very much, Gateley....

[Zorra]

56. _^_

.

[madokie]

59. There is no difference between us

some peoples heart is so full of hate I wonder how they survive the rage they must feel.

[Ecumenist]

63. Me too, MadOkie, me too.

[Stuart G]

60. outstanding...thanks ... nt

[Ecumenist]

65. Thank you for taking time to "listen" to the feelings of ALOT

of people, Stuart G.

[SwampG8r]

69. when i come here and read stuff like this i almost feel there

is hope for this place
first i wish you all the best in dealing with your health problems you have a tough row to hoe there
i can tell you have the kind of fire that can kick some serious cancer ass
i am 1/2 cherokee and 1/2 euro raised in the olden days in east tenn and i know a little about what you say
you put into words my feelings on this so well
if you arent one of the popular breeds the marginalization begins early
if they come for the gays they can come for the jews , the blacks,the latins,the natives.....
historicly "if" is the wrong word it should be "when"
i wish you the best and i will pray for your health

[Ecumenist]

71. Thank you from the bottom of my heart... SwampG8r

[AverageJoe90]

73. Nice post, but I have one very slight nitpick.

The anti-intermarriage laws in California were actually overturned in 1948, not 1972(or at least, the state ones. Were there local laws I didn't know about?).

And bless both your husband, and your uncle. Such wonderful people. =)

[Bluenorthwest]

76. Thanks for this lovley and loving post.....

You made my weekend, offered redemption of DU in my eyes, and made me know that some of us know we are all family, no matter what the all the nasties might say.
You are a wonderful writer as well.
Again, thanks to you for taking the time to write and post these thoughts from your heart.