In 2006, just months before South Carolina voters passed an amendment to the state constitution that defined marriage as being between one man and one woman, I sat on a “town hall” meeting panel to discuss the pending vote.
Right before the discussion inevitably degenerated into the same tired argument about whether the Bible condemns homosexuality or not, a tall, young, slender black man appeared before the audience microphone and admonished me for wanting the courts to impose marriage equality on the rest of the nation.
“Why don’t you wait until the polls show that the country is ready for gay marriage?” he asked sincerely.
I sighed and replied, “Sir, why is it okay for the courts to grant you your rights, but not mine? Do you realize that in 1968, just one year after the U.S. Supreme Court imposed interracial marriage on the entire country, do you realize that polls showed that 73 percent of Americans still disapproved of interracial marriage?”
“If,” I continued, “we had to wait for the tender mercies of the majority of this country to grant all minority groups their civil rights, I dare say that you, sir, would still be drinking from a different water fountain that me here in South Carolina.”
The auditorium erupted in applause and the man backed away from the microphone. My point had been made, and continues to be made in new polling data from the Pew Research Center on interracial marriage.
The good news is that nearly two-thirds of those polled say it would be fine “if a member of their own family were to marry someone outside their own racial or ethnic group.” But, that’s a fairly recent thing. In 1986, only a third of the public (33%) saw interracial marriage as acceptable for everyone. (Even in the new poll 27 percent said “they would be bothered” by an interracial marriage.) If the issue of interracial marriage — like same-sex marriage — had to wait until it had majority support in the nation, it would have been 1997 before it was allowed when 64 percent approved, some 30 years after Loving v. Virginia.
Instead, the courts “imposed” interracial marriage on the country and made the rest of us iron out our prejudices in the face of reality. Not that all of them did. As late as 1998, the community relations coordinator at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, was still using the Bible to justify separation of the races:
God has separated people for His own purpose. He has erected barriers between the nations, not only land and sea barriers, but also ethnic, cultural, and language barriers. God has made people different one from another and intends those differences to remain. Bob Jones University is opposed to intermarriage of the races because it breaks down the barriers God has established. It mixes that which God separated and intends to keep separate. Every effort in world history to bring the world together has demonstrated man’s self-reliance and his unwillingness to remain as God ordains. The attempts at one-worldism have been to devise a system without God and have fostered the promotion of a unity designed to give the world strength so that God is not needed and can be overthrown.
It would be another two years before Bob Jones repealed its own prohibition on interracial dating.
The courts were wise back then, realizing that the true immorality was allowing a majority vote on the rights of a minority. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — who vetoed a marriage equality bill there — might reflect on these historical facts and figures. That way he won’t be surprised when history remembers him as one of the backward thinking obstructionists who stood in the way of human equality.
