An interesting commentary on Race in the race

[richlevy]

You can thank the Supreme Court (no sarcasm) for dumping a very stupid set of laws. I wonder if our current court would have had the balls to do it.

The plaintiffs, Mildred Jeter (a woman of African and Rappahannock Indian descent)[1][2] and Richard Perry Loving (a white man), were residents of the Commonwealth of Virginia who had been married in June of 1958 in the District of Columbia, having left Virginia to evade the Racial Integrity Act, a state law banning marriages between any white person and a non-white person. Upon their return to Caroline County, Virginia, they were charged with violation of the ban. They were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section 20-59, which defined "miscegenation" as a felony punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five years. On 6 January 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. The trial judge in the case, Leon Bazile, echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 18th-century interpretation of race, proclaimed that
“ Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

40 years ago a judge could get away with saying this bullshit. Fortunately, the 'great middle' of American public opinion has swung to the point where anyone saying something like this from the bench would at a minimum be held up to public ridicule.

We have and are making progress.

BTW, miscegenation laws were found unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.