Marriage cannot be redefined

OP-ED | Jeff Jacoby

June 29, 2011|By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist

SAME-SEX wedlock became lawful in New York last week after the state legislature passed a bill recognizing “otherwise-valid marriages without regard to whether the parties are of the same or different sex.’’ Governor Andrew Cuomo, a fervent proponent of gay marriage, signed the bill into law Friday night.

No one was a fervent proponent of gay marriage 44 years ago this month when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that laws barring whites and blacks from marrying were unconstitutional. Same-sex marriage wasn’t even a fringe issue on June 12, 1967, the day the court handed down its landmark decision in Loving v. Virginia, invalidating anti-miscegenation statutes on the books in 16 states as “invidious racial discrimination … repugnant to the 14th Amendment.’’ If anyone had suggested to Chief Justice Earl Warren or his colleagues that in refusing to allow Virginia to continue perverting its marriage laws out of racial bigotry they were pointing the way to gay and lesbian marriages, they would have found the claim unintelligible.

But that hasn’t stopped same-sex marriage advocates from explicitly linking the two causes. Ted Olson and David Boies, the superlawyers leading the effort to overthrow California’s Proposition 8, pay tribute in a new video to Mildred and Richard Loving, the interracial couple at the heart of the 1967 case. “Forty-four years later,’’ they intone, “Loving v. Virginia still has a profound significance for another group of citizens who wish to marry, but are not allowed: gay and lesbian couples.’’

Similarly, in a column for The Hill, the ACLU’s Laura Murphy laments that “the changes brought about’’ by Loving are incomplete, since same-sex marriage is forbidden in almost every state. Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post makes the point in a blog headlined: “Loving v. Virginia gives hope for same-sex marriage.’’

By now, of course, the idea that same-sex couples should have the same freedom to marry as interracial couples has become a favorite gay-rights trump card. So has the view that opponents of gay marriage occupy the same moral and legal swamp as the segregationists who thought Mildred and Richard Loving’s marriage should be a crime. Today those who insist that society retain the timeless definition of marriage as the union of male and female can expect to be excoriated as bigots and haters, and to be assured that history will revile them just as it reviles Bull Connor and Lester Maddox.

I’m not so sure.

There is no disputing the emotional power of linking the campaign for gay marriage to the struggle over anti-miscegenation laws in the civil rights era. I agree that the two are connected. But not in the way same-sex marriage advocates think.