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[Odler]

http://www.jeanlouie.com/

March 18, 2004

?Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.?

This was a view held by those who opposed miscegenation, a term coined in 1863, to give a scientific connotation to interracial marriage. And, from that period, until 1967, 30 American states passed law prohibiting marriages between a white and a non-white.

It must be noted that a non-white was defined differently by different states. In some, one-eighth of black blood made you black, in others, one drop sufficed.

And, there were the penalties. People engaged in interracial unions would go to jail for up to five years in states like Virginia. But, jail term is minor compared to the lynching administered by the all too powerful KKK, a white supremacist organization funded in 1860s after the Civil War.

Today, the head of the United Nations (Koffi Anan), an African, is married to a Scandinavian woman. No couple can be any more interracial than this one. It is then intellectually fair to inquire on the reasons why interracial marriage was so ill-received in America.

The reasons were two-fold. The first one is biblical. Call it pseudo-biblical, because fundamentalists assimilate Africans with Canaanites a fact that was never proven.

In Deuteronomy 7:3-4, God, as follows, warns the chosen nation against the Canaanites: ?Neither shall you make marriage with them? For they will turn your son away from following me that they may serve other gods, so the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and destroy you suddenly.?

The second reason was scientific. Call it pseudo-scientific since all the basis of Eugenics, the science of race improvement through better breeding, were refuted by modern genetics. ?White race-purity is the cornerstone of our civilization,? said the eugenicists, therefore marrying a white to a species considered as inferior would only produce sterile human mules. Eugenics theories led to the Holocaust.

The pseudo biblical and scientific notions that today oppose gay marriage are similar to the ones that opposed interracial unions, not even forty years ago. Now, like then, they go against the right of 10% of the population of the United States.

Hollywood in its 100 year history has never showed a leading lady (not a secondary, often prostitute character) in bed with her black co-star. A black man openly making love to a white woman is as offensive to wider America as is the view of two male homosexuals kissing. It has everything to do with the way we feel, and nothing to do with the civil rights of the involved citizens.

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(OdlerRobert Jeanlouie, Thursday, March 18, 2004)