The Binary Circumstance

miscegenation n marriage or cohabitation between a white person and a member of another race [Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary]

Previous rulings by the courts that overturned bans on interracial marriages may provide the legal precedents to overturn bans on same-sex marriage. It was just 56 years ago that the California Supreme Court overturned California’s ban on interracial marriage.

The court acknowledged a long line of cases upholding race-based laws, including a widely cited 1869 Georgia ruling saying mixed-race procreation “is not only unnatural, but is always productive of deplorable results.” But in a 4-3 ruling, the California court said such viewpoints, and the laws they supported, were discredited by science and were contrary to basic concepts of equality.

Marriage is “a fundamental right of free men,” wrote Justice Roger Traynor in the rhetorical style of the day. “Legislation infringing such rights must be based on more than prejudice. … By restricting the individual’s right to marry on the basis of race alone, (the prohibitions) violate the equal protection of the laws.”

Just as the government once drew lines between whites and other races with laws that banned miscegenation, it continues to draw lines between gay and straight and male and female in the arena of marriage.

The remarkable thing about love is that it does not recognize the irrational boundries that are defined by laws and government. Love and committment are a function of individual values. A government does not have a mind or any other biological apparatus to engage in rational thought or to feel emotions. Therefore, government cannot have values.

The government is simply a tool for domination, a weapon that certain individuals use to impose their will, their values and their boundaries upon others. At the root of the same-sex marriage debate is the question of who has the right to control the life, the choices and values of each individual, the individual or somebody else?

The government as an irrational inanimate entity cannot make choices. It is irrational to ask if the government has the right to control the lives of individuals. The government cannot have such a “right” because it does not even have the capability. The question is whether certain individuals have a “right” to use government to control the most personal choices that individuals make in their lives.

To accept the premise that certain individuals exist to give orders and others exist to obey them is to accept that some people are superior simply because they possess a desire and an ability to give orders, not because they are more intelligent or have contributed more to society. This premise awards social superiority based on dominance and nothing else. Whether individuals have value depends entirely on who gains control of the government and nothing else. This is the worst form of anarchy and dehumanization.

Miscegenation laws defined interracial relationships as inferior to white-only relationships, just as bans on same-sex marriages define heterosexual relationships as superior to homosexual relationships.

The ban on interracial marriage was based on the asserted “superiority of the white race,” said attorney Jon Davidson of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, which has joined in the defense of same-sex weddings in San Francisco. At the heart of the current marriage prohibition, he said, is “an attempt to keep gay people inferior.”

Do those who support bans on same-sex marriages really want to live in a society where superiority and their value as a human being is determined by laws, by words written down on paper, and nothing else? Maybe they do. At least as long as they’re the ones writing the laws.

But what will happen when different group of social engineers gains control of the government and uses the same premise to declare them inferior and their voluntary associations invalid? You only need to look at Nazi Germany and the plantation south to see where that road leads.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 29th, 2004 at 10:44 am and is filed under Courts and Law, Gay Interest, Government/Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a reply. Pinging is currently not allowed.