We all know the Republicans are hot for the opportunity to strip trans people all of their rights, and are eager to inspect the genitals of every woman who tries to enter a women’s restroom. Of course, I’m a man, and I say I’m obviously a man (some may disagree), so this does not affect me in the slightest, because like a real man I lack empathy and don’t actually care about other people.
At least, that’s how I think they want society to be. Peel off the trans people, a tiny easy minority to target, and that’ll set a precedent and make it easier to oppress all the other people we’re not supposed to like. We must make America pure! I am so lucky to be a member of the ideal subset of humanity that is destined to be privileged even further, because enforcement is coming.
During an interview with reporters last week, Indiana Senator Mike Braun went beyond the usual Republican line that decisions about abortion rights should be left up to the states. The question of interracial marriage, too, he said, should be left to the states to decide.
Braun was responding to a reporter who seemed to be testing how far he would take his states’ rights philosophy: If the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade improperly interfered with individual states’ ability to set their own rules for abortion, as Braun argued, which of the court’s other decisions should be overturned on that basis? Should the court’s unanimous 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, which decreed state laws forbidding interracial marriage unconstitutional, also be overturned?
Braun said, emphatically, “Yes.” States will naturally have differing views on such issues, he continued, adding that “when you want that diversity to shine within our federal system, there are going to be rules, and proceedings, that are going to be out of sync with maybe what other states would do. That’s the beauty of the system.” He later tried to walk back the statement about Loving, claiming to have misunderstood the question, an implausible assertion given that the reporter reiterated and rephrased the question to check for understanding, which did not seem to bother Braun at the time.
It’s going to be a beautiful system, don’t you worry. We’re going to dictate who can marry, nobody will care about that, it’s all for the best. And that’s all!
Except…well, maybe we’ll also police gay marriage, and start cracking down on contraceptives.
Nevertheless, Braun’s comments reflect a broader shift among Republicans and those in the conservative legal movement. Emboldened by their new 6-3 majority on the high court, conservatives again and again have proven willing to challenge rulings seen very recently as firmly settled law. Case in point: Braun also indicated that the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized contraception for married couples, should be overturned, a statement he did not walk back. And he is not alone in that position. Other Republican politicians, including Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn and several candidates in this year’s race for state attorney general in Michigan, have also denounced Griswold. And just last week, during Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Texas Senator John Cornyn attacked the court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
We’ve seen this before. The Republicans are just following the true spirit of America, of the sort that inspired another country.
The idea of banning Jewish and Aryan marriages presented the Nazis with a dilemma: How would they tell who was Jewish and who was not? After all, race and ethnic categories are socially constructed, and interracial relationships produce offspring who don’t fall neatly into one box.
Again, the Nazis looked to America.
“Connected with these anti-miscegenation laws was a great deal of American jurisprudence on how to classify who belonged to which race,” he says.
Controversial “one-drop” rules stipulated that anyone with any Black ancestry was legally Black and could not marry a white person. Laws also defined what made a person Asian or Native American, in order to prevent these groups from marrying whites (notably, Virginia had a “Pocahontas Exception” for prominent white families who claimed to be descended from Pocahontas).
The Nuremberg Laws, too, came up with a system of determining who belonged to what group, allowing the Nazis to criminalize marriage and sex between Jewish and Aryan people. Rather than adopting a “one-drop rule,” the Nazis decreed that a Jewish person was anyone who had three or more Jewish grandparents.
Won’t it be neat-o when that set of rules is enshrined in our constitution?
Authoritarians gotta authoritate.
Hell, lets go full circle and put that whole slavery thing back on the table for consideration by each state.
Slavery was a “states rights” issue. Southern oligarchs dominated the Democratic party and with the Dred Scott decision and the Kansas-Nebraska Act made it clear that they were going to make every state possible a “slave state” so they could further dominate the national government. Perhaps the modern GOP wants to unravel the Civil War even more.
Short of that, all rulings on desegregation were rulings against state laws that mandated segregation whether it was marriage, access to schools, riding the bus, or eating at a lunch counter.
This is no surprise to me. What MAGA is to me is the embodiment of the Southern grievance culture that grew out of the 1950s. I heard it loud and clear in my sister-in-laws rantings 6 years ago. Beginning with George Wallace and Berry Goldwater, the GOP has exploited that disaffection among Southern Whites and helped it spread to other areas of the country. I assume that what MAGA means is to take the US back to the 1920s or earlier when marginalized people…Blacks, Women, Latinos, Native Americans, Unionized workers, etc…knew “their place” and stayed out of the way of White Men.
Indiana Senator Mike Braun, whom you quote, has been saying for a long time that he thinks states should be able to ban inter-racial marriages. Here he is in 2022 saying so outright:
https://www.someweekendreading.blog/republicans-against-interracial-marriage/
The GOP christofascists don’t believe this either, that abortion laws should be left up to the states.
.1. The only reason the GOP and the US Supreme court didn’t outlaw abortion nationally is because they politically were not able to at the time.
A complete ban would have been so unpopular that the GOP wouldn’t be able to win enough elections to keep power.
.2. The GOP will try to outlaw abortion in the entire USA sooner or later.
I’m sure they will try this time around while Trump is in power and they control the US congress.
.3. They are already setting up for this.
The new FDA, run by quacks and crackpots, is now trying to restrict the use of the common abortion drugs, including mifepristone.
They are using a fake study by right wingnuts that lies a lot about the imaginary problems with medical abortion drugs.
The GOP only believes in “states rights” when it comes to discriminating against and oppressing groups of people.
There must be some penalties here in Arizona if Clarence Thomas drives his RV here with that woman Ginny who he pretends is his wife. Like it can’t be legal for him to shack up with a white woman, amirite?
Ironically, that horrible excuse for a human, our VP JD Vance, is married to…a nonwhite.
A woman whose parents were from India.
The former head of the US Senate, McConnell from Kentucky, is married to Elaine Chao, a Chinese migrant from Taiwan.
Are the GOP going to issue Get out of Jail Free cards to their leaders who are married to nonwhites?
Or are they just going to be hypocrites and dare the White Race Purity police to arrest them?
Inquiring minds don’t really care.
A Niggle:
Braun is now governor of Indiana. His seat was taken by an even worse person, Jim Banks.
OH, and a vile person, even worse than Banks, Micah Beckwith, foisted himself on Braun, as Lt. Governor. Recently, Beckwith put out a video praising the “3/5 of a person compromise” in the US Constitution as a brilliant ploy by the North to end slavery. As one might expect, Beckwith is a Youth Pastor at some fundigelical church.
fusilier
James 2:24
I should write about my year spent living in Indiana sometime. There was some very good and some incredibly appallingly bad.
Precedents for loss of empathy
For calling that a sin.
For beleiving that thy neioghbour
Should be loved and not turned in..
For baby Jesus said so
As his nappy he did foul
The stench of the Repugs about
The evil they do howl.
Evil = treating others w sadism & not compassion.
Treating those who are different as you would rather NOT be treated and with hate and not with empathy.
They claim that they believe his words, they claim to follow him
Yet they do the oppsoite, his ideals they throw in bin.
They make him into an idol.
This ancent long dead jew.
But they do not remotely follow him
They do as they choose to do
Fig trees being fig tress excepted..
W apologies to he Digital Cuttlefish who I’m sure could do much better poetics~wise.
Maybe also apologies to King Lear & the Bard as well.
Yáll feel free to use as best suits and come up with modified beter versions here.in hope it somehow helps.
“Three generations of imbiciles is enough.” That’s a more-than-adequate explanation for the current Secretary of HHS and more others at high levels of government over the last quarter of a century (regardless of “party” etc.).
We’ll just conveniently forget to mention that that judicial gloss (Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927)) was used consistently and repeatedly by actual Nazis (not just those being compared to them) in war crimes prosecutions, as overdramatized but largely accurately presented in Judgement [sic] at Nuremberg, in perhaps the ultimate “but what about…” attack on their prosecutors. We’ll also avoid looking too closely at Carrie Buck’s ancestry.
The real distinction is that “real Americans” would both admit error and strive to do better. Those currently proclaiming themselves “Real ‘murikans”… not so much.
Defining ohers as, well, the Other. Oldest trick in book.
^ Oh and also that its okay to hurt and kill and genocide t’other becoz they ae Other…Which. NO. Just no.
That inevitably leads to the question: If interracial marriages are legal in some state but illegal in others, what happens when a legally married interracial couple travels into a state where their marriage is a crime? It’s like the states today that try to ban pregnant women from even traveling to other states for abortion, causing states to get increasingly extreme in preventing women from doing that, such as criminalizing their traveling before they even leave the state..
Also, as an FYI, the Va. colonial marriage law of 1662 that banned interracial sex prohibited “Christians” from having sex with “Negroes.” So religion, not race, was the original basis of the earliest such law. Likewise, when the Md. colonial legislature banned such marriages in 1664, it was because “so many freeborn English women” were marrying “Negroes.” By law, a freeborn English man or woman had to be a Christian, so again religion is the implicit basis of the ban, not race. IF interracial sex was so unthinkable because of racial beliefs, why were such marriages even possible? The actual number was probably pretty small, but the mere fact that such marriages existed belies claims that racism was involved. I should add that a few years later, English judges began ruling that slavery was legal because Christians had a right to enslave “Negroes” because they were pagans. (I know of at least 3 such rulings in 17th-century lawsuits over slavery.)
Maybe American should just hang the fascists from street lights now, and just skip the whole WWIII thing.
“That inevitably leads to the question: If interracial marriages are legal in some state but illegal in others, what happens when a legally married interracial couple travels into a state where their marriage is a crime?’
Nothing much should happen, though the specifics would depend on whether the marriage is recognised as legal; if it is, how can it be criminal, and if it’s not, then they are not married, so how can it be criminal? :)
@John Morales #18:
I expect they’ll criminalise pretending to be married. Dump your wedding rings and surnames at the border, and don’t you dare book anything other than single motel rooms.
Rich, maybe. You do make me think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas#Personal_life
wsierichs @16:
I think you’re making a considerable analytic, or perhaps just rhetorical, error here: It’s a dessert topping and a floor wax, not “one” or “the other” or amenable to “the true origin is ___.”
Consider, for a moment, the context of the Colonial-era statutes you describe as the “origin” of miscegenation statutes. They arose during the first few years after the Treaty of Westphalia, ending the First Thirty Years’ War — one that the colonial “parent” had largely managed to avoid (so it could fight its own civil war, which was no longer “raging” by 1664 but was far from “relegated to the history books”). Race was not consciously an issue because they were too busy indiscriminately killing people of the wrong nationality to even have time to consider the rather rare racial interactions in and around London in the 1660s and 1670s.
Whether it’s a dessert topping or a floor wax, it leaves a
waxy yellow buildupmore than faint odor of “we just had a slightly different immediate perception of what it takes to be Other, and we were too busy acting on it to refine it/extend it” in the conversation. Trying to point to one particular kind of bigotry as the origin requires rather selective views of the evidence — and ignoring mountains of other evidence (like where William and Mary came from before the Glorious Revolution; or the repeated incursions of “the Turks” into the Balkans, eventually extending to Vienna at close to the same time as the Glorious Revolution, at time that “the Turks” was at least as much a racial descriptor as a national one).If decisions about abortions rights and interracial marriage should not be made by the federal government, why stop at the states? Why not counties? Townships, towns, cities? Districts, Streets? Families? Individuals? Long live diversity!
I’m from the UK, and have never understood what was ever supposed to be so bad about interracial marriage that you felt the need to have a law against it.
If someone married someone you didn’t like, you could always just stop being friends with them?
[bluerizlagirl, I suppose you’ve never met any skinheads]