Interracial Vs. Gay Marriage: Are Miscegenation Laws Really a Thing of the Past?

It took nearly 300 years for interracial activists to finally convince lawmakers to repeal the widespread miscegenation laws adopted by our leaders in 1664. These laws refused interracial couples the legal right to marry and deemed all interracial sex as illicit. Statements such as these can only remind us of today's governmental fight against gay marriage.

With white supremacists leading America throughout the last three centuries, it is not hard to understand why laws against interracial marriages were drafted and adopted in 30 out of 50 states. The remaining states simply believed there was no need for new laws against the "unnatural" acts due to the ingrained knowledge of God's will to refute the mixing of races. After the white Southerners were defeated in the Civil War, states began passing new and stronger laws. The federal government tried to force the states to abandon these miscegenation laws through their Reconstruction effort. This effort only strengthened the southern states' support for the laws. The infamous black codes, as they were called, sited four arguments against interracial marriage. First, judges claimed the legality of interracial marriage was only enforceable by the states rather than the federal government. Second, they began to define all interracial relationships as illicit sex rather than marriage. Third, they set out to enforce God's will by claiming interracial marriage was deemed sinful by the Bible. And finally, fourth, they continued to refute the naturalness of the act.

As years turned into decades, the laws passed throughout the states began defining interracialty on a more encompassing scale. Marriages between any two "different" people were now considered unlawful. Included were Caucasians, Asian Americans, American Indians, Chinese, Kanaka, Hawaiians, and of course, African Americans. Between 1880 and 1950, miscegenation laws were at their peak of power and certain groups were convinced they could no longer allow the constitution 14^th amendment to be so unlawfully broken.