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We've Heard This Before: the Legacy of Interracial Marriage Bans and the Implications for Today's Marriage Equality Debat

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We've Heard This Before: the Legacy of Interracial Marriage Bans and the Implications for Today's Marriage Equality Debat WE’VE HEARD THIS BEFORE: THE LEGACY OF INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE BANS AND THE IMPLICATIONS FOR TODAY’S MARRIAGE EQUALITY DEBATES Greg Johnson ∗† INTRODUCTION Is it fair to compare bans on interracial marriage to bans on same-sex marriage? Courts have wrestled with this question since the inception of the debate on same-sex marriage. The first same-sex marriage cases were filed soon after the United States Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia , which struck down bans on interracial marriage in Virginia and fifteen other states. 1 The Court stated boldly, “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man[.]’” 2 Same-sex couples argued this broad language applied to them as well. The early same-sex marriage cases all rejected this analogy. The Minnesota Supreme Court, in the first same-sex marriage case in 1971, dismissed the comparison in a single sentence, which seemed so self-evident to the court that it did not need a citation: “[I]n commonsense and in a constitutional sense, there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex.” 3 In recent times, however, courts have used Loving to support the constitutional claim to same-sex marriage. 4 The Vermont Supreme Court relied on Loving in Baker v. State , the groundbreaking 1999 decision, which ∗ Professor of Law and Director, Legal Writing Program, Vermont Law School; J.D. 1985 Notre Dame Law School; B.A. 1982 Cornell University. † I would like to thank my research assistant, Jenna Seibeck. I would also like to thank Professor Bruce Duthu for inviting me to speak at Law Day at Dartmouth College and for organizing such a wonderful symposium. My thanks to Professor Gil Kujovich, John Miller, and Peter Truong for their valuable comments. Finally, thanks to Dean Geoffrey Shields of Vermont Law School for his generous support of this article. This article is dedicated to the memory of Professor Michael Mello. 1. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967). 2. Id. (quoting Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541 (1942)). 3. Baker v. Nelson, 191 N.W.2d 185, 187 (Minn. 1971). 4. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, for example, relied on Loving and Perez v. Lippold , 198 P.2d 17 (Cal. 1948), a California miscegenation case, in its historic decision granting same-sex couples the right to marry. See Goodridge v. Dep’t of Pub. Health, 798 N.E.2d 941, 958 (Mass. 2003). In this case, as in Perez and Loving , a statute deprives individuals of access to an institution of fundamental legal, personal, and social significance—the institution of marriage—because of a single trait: skin color in Perez and Loving , sexual orientation here. As it did in Perez and Loving, history must yield to a more fully developed understanding of the invidious quality of the discrimination. Id. 278 Vermont Law Review [Vol. 34:277 resulted in the Vermont Legislature passing a first-in-the-nation civil union law. 5 Chief Justice Amestoy, writing for the majority, focused less on the race component of Loving and more on the U.S. Supreme Court’s view that guaranteeing a fundamental right to marry was essential to the welfare of society. 6 When viewing Loving through this wider lens, the Vermont court saw plenty of parallels between the earlier case and today’s debate on same- sex marriage. 7 Other courts have relied on Loving for this more general principle of marriage equality when holding that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. 8 The academic community has also debated the relevance of the old bans on interracial marriage. Some agree with Professor Peggy Pascoe that “it is virtually impossible to understand the current debate over same-sex marriage without first understanding the history of American miscegenation laws and the long legal fight against them . .”9 Noted gay-rights scholar William Eskridge believes that Loving ’s declaration of a fundamental right to marry “bears directly on the right of same-sex couples to marry.” 10 On the opposite end, the late Professor David Coolidge, a prominent opponent of marriage equality, accused those who use the analogy of playing “the Loving card” in an attempt to “slander[] with the brush of bigotry.” 11 Gay 5. Baker v. State, 170 Vt. 194, 744 A.2d 864 (1999); VT. STAT . ANN . tit. 15, §§ 1201–1207 (2000). 6. Baker , 744 A.2d at 883 (“The [United States Supreme] Court’s point was clear; access to a civil marriage license and the multitude of legal benefits, protections, and obligations that flow from it significantly enhance the quality of life in our society.”). 7. Id. “The Supreme Court’s observations in Loving merely acknowledged what many states, including Vermont, had long recognized. One hundred thirty-seven years before Loving , this court characterized the reciprocal rights and responsibilities flowing from the marriage laws as ‘the natural rights of human nature.’” Id. (citation omitted). 8. See, e.g ., Kerrigan v. Comm’r of Pub. Health, 957 A.2d 407, 481 (Conn. 2008) (citing Loving for the proposition that marriage is a basic civil right). 9. Peggy Pascoe, Why the Ugly Rhetoric Against Gay Marriage is Familiar to this Historian of Miscegenation , HIST . NEWS NETWORK , Apr. 19, 2004, http://hnn.us/articles/4708.html. 10. WILLIAM N. ESKRIDGE , JR., THE CASE FOR SAME -SEX MARRIAGE 159 (1996). Eskridge sees many parallels between the earlier and the current struggles for marriage equality. The strategy of opponents [of same-sex marriage] has been to essentialize the social institution of marriage around the concept of husband and wife. The same strategy was followed by opponents of different-race marriage, who essentialized marriage around the concept of racial purity. To support their definititional argument, opponents cited historical practice, natural law’s abhorrence of procreative mixing, and religious text and tradition. And for almost all of American history, opponents prevailed. Loving was a rejection of this way of thinking, however. Its reasoning provides support for other challenges to natural law thinking about the legal institution of marriage. Id . at 154. 11. David Orgon Coolidge, Playing the Loving Card: Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Analogy , 12 BYU J. PUB . L. 201, 213 (1998). 2009] Legacy of Interracial Marriage Bans 279 rights advocates are split on the merits of the comparison. Some fear the “sameness” argument risks contributing to injustice and alienating potential supporters in the African–American community by ignoring the differences between the two civil rights struggles. 12 Professor George Chauncey has said “[c]laiming the two experiences have been the same does no justice to history and no service to the gay cause.” 13 I certainly agree that supporters of marriage equality must make an independent, moral claim as to why same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. At the same time, my study of the bans on interracial marriage and the cases that upheld them has convinced me that the earlier struggle for marriage equality is relevant to today’s debate. In 1948, the California Supreme Court decided Perez v. Lippold and became the first high court in the country to declare unconstitutional a state’s ban on interracial marriage. 14 Ace advocates like Beth Robinson have used Perez to great effect in arguing for same-sex marriage. 15 Far more fascinating to me, though, are the many, many cases before 1948, which upheld bans on interracial marriage. I have had the unpleasant task of immersing myself in this disturbing jurisprudence. The arguments made in these cases are strikingly similar to arguments made today against same-sex marriage. These arguments include religion and natural law, procreation, concern for the children, deference to the legislature, 16 and the slippery-slope argument 12. Rebecca Schatschneider, On Shifting Sand: The Perils of Grounding the Case for Same- Sex Marriage in the Context of Antimescegenation , 14 TEMP . POL . & CIV . RTS . L. REV . 285, 304–05 (2004) (“[W]e contribute to the very injustice we condemn when we indiscriminately claim the moral authority of the civil rights movement for ourselves.”); Catherine Smith, Queer as Black Folk? , 2007 WISC . L. REV . 379, 407 (“LGBT discourse that frames homophobia as being the same as racism reinforces homophobia, racism, and sexism.”). 13. GEORGE CHAUNCEY , WHY MARRIAGE ? THE HISTORY SHAPING TODAY ’S DEBATE OVER GAY EQUALITY 161 (2004). 14. Perez v. Lippold, 198 P.2d 17, 35 (Cal. 1948). 15. Robinson, lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Baker v. State , opened her oral argument before the Vermont Supreme Court with a persuasive analogy to Perez . Comparing attitudes toward interracial marriage at the time of Perez to attitudes toward same-sex marriage at the time of Baker , she said, “The notion of a black person and a white person marrying was as antithetical to many peoples’ conception of what a marriage was as the notion of a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman appears to be to the State of Vermont today.” DVD: Oral Argument in Baker v. State (1998) (on file with author). Robinson chronicled the arguments made against interracial marriage in the dissent in Perez to reveal how those same arguments were made by the State of Vermont against same-sex marriage. She said,“the parallels between [ Perez ] and this case are striking.” Id. 16. See, e.g. , Scott v. State, 39 Ga. 321, 1869 WL 1667, at *3 (Ga. 1869). “The Code of Georgia . prohibits the marriage relation between the two races, and declares all such marriages null and void . With the policy of this law we have nothing to do.
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