11:04 - Mildred Loving
You probably have never heard of Richard and Mildred Loving.
They had lived in Virginia all their life, and they loved each other. They got married in Washington D.C. in 1958. When they returned to their home in Virginia, this marriage caused anger, attacks, and they were found guilty of a felony.
You see, Mildred was black, and Richard was white. In the trial, the judge said:
"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."
Their case, known as Loving v. Virginia, eventually went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court found that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution protects marriage even between different races. The chief justice, Earl Warren, wrote:
"The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."
Mildred Loving died on Friday, May 2, 2008. My heart goes out to her and to her children.
Take care, all.
It would be interesting to know on which day he created each of the four, too, because then one could infer a dominance hierarchy. ;-)
The story of Noah's sons in Genesis talks of God creating three races, generally considered to be Africans, Europeans and Semites (Jews and Arabs both). Asia was apparently unknown at the time. This system has the distinct advantage of allowing one to refer to the French as 'Gomerites'.
Also, there's a dominance heirarchy explicitly given, with the Africans at the bottom, if one identifies "Sons of Ham" to be Africans. There're vast, vast quantities of pamphlets on this subject from just prior to the American Civil War.
This is one of the odd bits of Sunday School that I distinctly recall. I would have been about seven or eight, so it was 1968 or so, and racial discrimination was firmly in the news. I attended the northern branch of the UMC, which was very much a civil rights church, and opposed to Biblical literalism anyway. We got a lot of sermons and SS lessons about applying critical thinking to the Bible, and not just going along with the traditional interpretations.
Mmm.. ham...
Thanks.