Box Turtle Bulletin

Star Parker, JC Watts and Bishop Harry Jackson file amicus brief for Prop 8 Proponents

Three organizations (consisting primarily of three individuals) which represent socially conservative African-Americans have provided an amicus brief to the Ninth Circuit for their consideration in the appeal to Judge Walker’s finding in Perry v. Schwarzenegger that Proposition 8 is a violation of the US Constitution. All three have long been opponents of equality for gay people.

The High Impact Leadership Coalition (Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr.), The Center for for Urban Renewal and Education (Star Parker), and the terribly misnamed Frederick Douglass Foundation, Inc. (former Congressman JC Watts, R-OK) weighed in to argue that “civil rights of parties to same-sex relationships are not advanced by reliance on legal principles that otherwise have served to further the civil rights of African-Americans.”

The history of marriage in the constitutions and laws in America clearly demonstrates that the American people, their elected representatives, and their legal charters flatly reject any assertion that racially segregated marriage (as in Loving) is somehow comparable to sexually integrated marriage of a man and a woman.

Miscegenation laws were based on Supremacy and invidious discrimination, you see. Ummmm….

And besides, as not all states had miscegenation laws, then the core purpose of marriage wasn’t tied to race like it is to gender. To make their point, they offer a numbers exercise.

To begin, of the thirteen States that never had antimiscegenation laws, ten now protect man-woman marriage by positive law or interpretation of statute. Four of the thirteen also protect man-woman marriage by constitutional amendment, which requires approval by at least a majority vote of the people of the State.

Seven States once had antimiscegenation laws but repealed them before Perez v. Sharp, 32 Cal.2d 711, 198 P.2d 17 (Cal. 1948). Today, five of those states expressly protect the institution of man-woman marriage, using both statutes and constitutional amendments.

Fourteen States repealed their antimiscegenation laws after Perez and before Loving. Today, all of those States protect man-woman marriage, most of them with both statutes and constitutional amendments.

So obviously, marriage as a fundamental right only applies to black people and not to gay people.

They go on to rant about the procreative aspect of marriage (citing cased from the 1880s and 1920s) never realizing that their quotes about individuals having the right “to marry, establish a home and bring up children” or about marriage being “the foundation of the family and of society” actually serve to further our argument rather than their own.

Operating under the presumption that family=heterosexual, they only reveal their bias and that it is presumption of heterosexual superiority that is behind every anti-gay marriage argument.

And they go on and on about the intents and appropriateness of the Loving decision, never noting that Mildred Loving herself saw her fight to marry the person she loved as comparable to the fight of gay men and women to marry the person they love.

This fundamental distinction lies at the heart of the point that Yale Law Professor Stephen L. Carter made on the thirtieth anniversary of Loving. He wrote: “One of the beauties of Loving v. Virginia was precisely that it was very easy to see how these were people trying to do a very ordinary thing, and got in trouble for it.”

That distinguishes Loving from the position of advocates of same-sex marriage who are trying to do a very extraordinary thing—to redefine the institution of marriage.

In their conclusion, they claim that using Loving v. Virginia as support for the fundamental right to marry, is just another example of “an illegitimate attempt to appropriate a valuable cultural icon for political purposes.” They don’t note the irony.