Loving v. bigotry

I just read this essay Michael Alvear wrote for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, about how the current movement for marriage rights for homosexuals parallels earlier civil rights struggles, and success is inevitable. It makes some degree of sense, though it’s bound to cause further apoplexy in those who get upset over “judicial activism“. He spoils it a bit by engaging in some American exceptionalism at the end, claiming that “America has change in its blood the way other countries have permanence in theirs,” even though he’d pointed out earlier that most western nations are more accepting of gays than the US is.

The essay prompted me to read the text of Loving v. Virginia, the case in which the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, where I found another parallel: in both gay freedom-to-marry and interracial freedom-to-marry, the opponents of freedom make/made raving batshit arguments trying to deny that they’re denying people equal protection and rights. The anti-gay-marriage crowd sometimes claims that gay people, like straight people, have the right to marry people of the opposite sex, and are thus not being discriminated against. The state of Virginia, in Loving v. Virginia, argued that since both the white and non-white members of the married couple were punished under its law, the law didn’t discriminate racially.