Loudoun Times-Mirror
June 28, 2005
By Stevens Miller, Ashburn
“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.”
The paragraph above was written by a judge in support of his order in the 1967 case Loving vs. Virginia that a black wife and her white husband were to be banished from the state for 25 years after pleading guilty to violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages. Had it been enforced, this sentence would have expired in 1983.
Today, not even 25 years after that, we are a different Virginia. We know better than to outlaw love in the name of God.
Or do we? It seems as though the ghosts of that forgotten judge and his dead prejudice have come to haunt us.
This time, though, instead of race, the bigots are trying to outlaw love based on sex. Specifically, when the lovers are of the same sex. How can this be? How can we have forgotten how foolish our state looked, not 50 years ago, when this kind of thing was tried before?
Why must we grow up all over again, instead of embracing a few self-evident truths, all of which deserve to be taken together: There is nothing wrong with being black or white, there is nothing wrong with being gay, and there is nothing wrong with being in love with someone who is a different color or the same sex.