Although unequal marriage laws may not have been passed with the intention to enforce the social, economic, and political inferiority of gays and lesbians they still have that effect.

Amicus, further to that is that some jurisdictions didn’t define marriage as one man one woman, but when gays tried to marry they changed their laws to prevent it. Those traditional marriage laws were certainly devised to oppress gays and lesbians.

GGA:

10. Throughout history, no society’s laws have explicitly forbidden gay marriage.
They have not explicitly forbidden it because, until recently, it has not been
thought possible. What is more, antimiscegenation laws, at least in the United States, were meant to keep blacks separate from whites, and thus in a position of social, economic, and political inferiority to them. But traditional marriage laws were not devised to oppress those with same‐sex attractions. The comparison is
offensive, and puzzling to many—
p. 249, footnote

Intense umbrage at that, GGA.

1. Just because laws weren’t used/devised with aforethought about gays, in that past, doesn’t mean that cannot be used that way now, in the absence of criminal sodomy laws.

2. The distinction in intent is bogus. I’d hazard that not a single miscegenation law was put on the books with the stated rationale of ‘economic supremacy’. The stated reasons were very likely to have been quite different (see above). Indeed, at trial (Prop8), there was plenty of evidence of malice (and hypocrisy) towards gays among proponents of the law.

3. Last, we can easily make inferences and observations from the slew ‘marriage protection laws’ in recent memory that show how infuriating is GGA’s effort to minimize the parallels to systemic and criminal disenfranchisement.

Here’s an easy way to illustrate the overbroad nature of these statues:

Because there is a penis going into a vagina somewhere in the state of Virginia, gay couples in that state cannot share in partner benefits, even when supported by their own tax dollars, cannot enter into private contract to support their relationship because they are denied doing so by public policy, can be forced to testify against each other (even if they have kids) and can be fired at will, simply because of a native non-orientation to penis-in-vagina and public affirmation of the same.

So, please, spare us the Harvard journal pretense or head-in-the-sand portraiture that there is no soft “Jim Crow” going on under the rubric “protect marriage”.

I’ve Googled them – interesting reading emerging. This appears to be very much a Princetonian Catholic attempt at “natural law” arguments.

Anderson’s “Advice on Being A Christian Student” contains one little gem: “Now, same-sex marriage threatens to detach gender, sex, babies, and moms and dads from marriage.”

Gergis’s “On Guns, Knives, Sexual Organs . . . ” article (Mirror of Justice) has this lengthy chunk: “My defense of this aspect of George and Lee’s view relies in no way on the “perverted faculty” argument, according to which it is immoral to use body parts against their natural function. With George and Lee, I consider that argument clearly fallacious. And anyway, I have said nothing directly about the morality of same-sex relations. I have only relied on the idea that organs have natural functions, in order to defend the intelligibility of the concept of reproductive-type acts, in which a man and a woman can cooperate by way of their reproductive organs, regardless of their fertility.”

Seems like bloviation to me. Boiled down: “I’m not calling them immoral, just un-natural.”

To be fair, you are sneaking in your conclusion when you say they harm the targets for no good reason. _If_ the nature of marriage were somehow exclusively male-female, then that might be a “good reason” to ban, even if it harmed the target of a law.

Just as sodomy prosecutions and convictions were rare, the laws were on the books (and kept kept there) as a pre-emptive, Damoclesean threat until they were eliminated.

It’s these little inequities and oppressive measures, taken all in all, that add up to systemic subjugation of a class of people.

(Although I greatly doubt that you could actually get yourself arrested/fined nowadays under this statute, even if you tried to do so.)

http://delcode.delaware.gov/title13/c001/sc01/index.shtml

Section 101a states that marriages between people of the same sex are void.

Section 101d states that people obtaining marriages in other jurisdictions that would be prohibited by the criteria in section a have a void marriage.

Section 102 states that the penalty for entering into a void marriage is a $100 fine, or 30 days in jail if that fine is not paid.

Section 104 *also* reiterates that there is a criminal penalty for entering into void marriages in other jurisdictions and then living as husband and husband in my state.

By hopping up to Connecticut to get married, i’d be facing at *least* a $100 fine. A pittance for some, maybe, but a criminal penalty none-the-less.

You do point out an important distinction, though. Something to chew on. (Though if the Texas GOP gets its way, even that distinction will start to fade).

Perhaps the final version should read, “The bans on interracial and same-sex marriage are analogous in some ways — the very ways, in fact, that George claims they are not.”