by E. J. Graff
Meanwhile, segregationists sounded the intermarriage threat incessantly. When Walter White, director of the NAACP in the 1950s—a blue-eyed and white-skinned “Negro”—married a white woman, Herman E. Talmadge, former Governor of Georgia wrote, “There it is for anyone to see. The ultimate aim of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the complete amalgamation of the races.” Mixed-race marriage, in other words—however individual couples might have desired it, however blatantly unjust the ban against it—was no group’s goal. In this way, the battle over mixed-race marriage is unlike the battle over same-sex marriage: it was useful to very few black people, since most of them could marry the person they loved. No lesbian or gay man can.
And yet some of the reasons for the bans are similar. Inflammatory as mixed-race marriage was and is—literally inflammatory, at times inciting riots when mobs realized a black man and white woman were living together—the threat was not what lay at the end of equality’s road, but the road itself. Social equality wasn’t frightening because it led to intermarriage; rather, intermarriage was frightening because it implied social equality. Or as one anthropologist writes, “One can usually take for granted that families consider themselves to be roughly equal economically or socially if they believe it is acceptable to join together in a marriage.” At a time when segregationists could still insist with pride that “to hold a superior race, with all its material, intellectual, and moral interests, under the heel of an inferior race . . . is, every way, such an outrageous proceeding, that it staggers belief,” no wonder they could also write that “intermixture of the two races is contrary to nature and the well-being of man; that it brings corruption of blood and confusion; breeds a class of deficient mongrels, generally short-lived, and in a few generations sterile.” If I believe you’re that far beneath me, I must protect my superiority and its privileges by banning you from my tribe—because marrying would mean you were my equal and therefore deserved equal treatment in every other way. The parallel in the same-sex marriage fight is that many of those opposed believe that “to permit persons of the same sex to marry is to declare, or more precisely to be understood by many people to be declaring, that homosexual marriage is a desirable, even a noble, condition in which to live.”
And so it wasn’t until the civil rights movement had won the moral battle for the nation’s conscience that mixed-race marriage laws could fall—not because it was an item on the civil rights agenda, and certainly not because most Americans yet believed that mixed-race marriage was “a desirable, even a noble, condition in which to live,” but because of a subversive pair of individual hearts. Two separate fights are worth noting—since one “activist” (to use the imprecation hurled by today’s conservatives) state court raced ahead of its populace in striking down its intermarriage ban twenty years before the Supreme Court followed. In 1948, Andrea Perez, a white woman, and Sylvester D—, a black man, argued that they were both Roman Catholics—and that banning their marriage violated their freedom of religion. They were backed by the Catholic Church, which had always been especially interested in erasing the out-marriage taboo, treating us all as “neither Greek nor Jew” but united in Christ. The California Court decided—far ahead of its time—that if a white man could marry a white woman, then it would be discrimination to say that a black man could not, based solely on his race.
Over the next decades some state legislatures repealed their intermarriage bans. In others, notably the former slave-owning states, individuals challenged the ban in the courts—and saw these bans upheld. Some state courts all but dared the Supreme Court to decide that “the newfound concept of ‘social justice’ has outdated ‘the law of the land.’ ” The Court refrained until it had dismantled more important props of segregation.
In 1958, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeters drove to Washington, D.C., to evade Virginia’s ban and get married, then drove right back home. Within six weeks, they were arrested by a Virginia sheriff at 2:00 A.M. and hauled off to jail. After being convicted of their felony, they were released—on the condition that they leave the state for twenty-five years, or face a year in jail. As the ACLU pursued their case in both the Virginia and federal courts, the Virginia judge who ruled against them wrote, “If the Federal Government can determine who can marry in a State, there is no limit to its power.” Only sixteen states still had bans on their books in 1967, when the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. In Loving v. Virginia, the Court ruled that the ban on Richard’s and Mildred’s marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment, resting as it did “solely upon distinctions drawn according to race.”
It was not a popular decision. According to one contemporary Gallup poll, 72 percent of Americans then disapproved of interracial marriage (far more than disapprove of same-sex marriage today); perhaps more shocking, 48 percent believed interracial marriage should be a crime. And yet there were no race riots, no mass movement for repeal, no courthouse sit-ins. Unlike integrated schools or affirmative action, if you opposed mixed-race marriage all you had to do was not marry someone of another race—or, as happened in my own family, inflict pain by refusing to speak to those who did.
The war of the words The jeremiads against mixed-race marriage will sound familiar—although since this fight was about marrying outside the tribe (and since so many people suspect that those beyond their tribe aren’t fully human), accusations that mixed-race marriage was actually bestiality were especially prominent. Turn-of-the-century pseudoscience “proved” that Europeans and Africans were nearly separate species with scrupulously gathered data on such comparative “measurements” as “nasal index,” hair “distinctly woolly, not merely frizzly,” and “a peculiar rancid odor, compared . . . to that of the buck goat,” all of which made sexual relations between the races “disgraceful and almost bestial.” The comparison of African-Americans to the lesser animals was sounded incessantly, in the most “respectable” quarters. A Florida judge wrote in 1955,
segregation . . . is and always has been the unvarying law of the animal kingdom. The dove and the quail, the turkey and the turkey buzzard, the chicken and the guinea, it matters not where they are found, are segregated; place the horse, the cow, the sheep, the goat, and the pig in the same pasture and they instinctively segregate . . . when God created man, he allotted each race his own continent according to color, Europe to the white man, Asia to the yellow man, Africa to the black man, and America to the red man, but we are now advised that God’s plan was in error and must be reversed.
No matter that it had been the “white man” who had violated God’s plan by invading continents and either kidnapping or “buying” human beings. This rhetoric was repeated so widely that you’d think they were all reading from the same secret white-supremacy handbook, passed out at birth.
But though bestiality and God’s plan were favorites, all the usual suspects were dragged in. In 1872, one Tennessee judge issued a ruling against a racially mixed couple who’d moved to his state, suggesting that if he allowed this, the tide of contamination would never stop:
. . . we might have in Tennessee the father living with his daughter, the son with the mother, the brother with his sister, in lawful wedlock, because they had formed such relations in a state or country where they were not prohibited. The Turk or the Mohammedan, with his numerous wives, may establish his harem at the doors of the capital, and we are without remedy. Yet none of these are more revolting, more to be avoided, or more unnatural than the case before us.
Of course, children of mixed-race pairs would wither and die, since “hybrids are never healthy or vigorous, and vanish with the third or fourth generation.” One Georgia court famously stated that “the offspring of these unnatural connections are generally sickly, effeminate, and that they are inferior to the full blooded of either race in physical development and strength.” The words are surely familiar from the accusations hurled against two moms or two dads raising kids. As we’ve seen before, when a marriage rule is outdated, th
ere’s nothing much to say except, You and your children will sicken and die, and God will punish all of civilization.
The codes and emotions barring marriage to outsiders remain eerily similar from one group to another. There seems to be, inside us, some horror at mixing whatever seems essentially us—in the same way that Leviticus prohibited you from wearing a garment that mixed two fibers, or eating any food that was not clearly fish or mammal, or blurring your gender by lying with another man. Mixing reveals that your group identity is a mirage, fictional as the Emperor’s new clothes. It poses a vertiginous question to anyone who believes in their group identity: Am I not, after all, so separate and superior, so endowed with a “world-ruling and world-conquering” destiny?
So are the battles for interracial marriage and same-sex marriage comparable? Not in the kinship sense: mine is not an out-marriage. Like most of our heterosexual siblings, most lesbians and gay men find someone of a similar cultural background: our marriages do not necessarily push the boundaries of our ethnic, racial, class, or religious tribes. From the point of view of the out-marrying taboo, marriage is for demonstrating equal status between two families. And if that is the case, then marriages between two women or two men can either observe—or violate—the taboo, just as a marriage between a man and a woman can.
What is comparable—and comparably frightening—is that civil marriage would imply that lesbians and gay men are our heterosexual siblings’ social equals. Even more significant, same-sex marriage will imply that the sexes are deeply and fundamentally equal. In the spring of 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention passed two closely linked rules: that a wife must “submit” to her husband and that homosexuality must be opposed by every possible means. Those ideas are twin sides of the same coin. If a woman marries another woman, who’s in charge? Restricting marriage to husband/wife pairs is an essential symbol of male supremacy—just as restricting marriage to one race was an essential symbol of white supremacy. It’s no mistake, in other words, that those most vocally against my marriage to Madeline are also against abortion rights, divorce, childcare, laws mandating postpartum leave, or anything else that might let women escape the nineteenth-century hearth. Same-sex marriage reveals that marriage need not be hierarchical at all, that biology is not destiny, that marriage can be about not obedience but love.
And there is another comparable fear: the fear the tribe will disappear. Segregationists charged that legalizing interracial marriage would “make this country a brown race”—committing race suicide, to quote Teddy Roosevelt. In a similar way, some opponents of same-sex marriage fear that with Melissa Etheridge and Julie Cypher up there as an optional model, suddenly all women will flee their husbands and marry their best girlfriends, or that after learning about the long and contented life together of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, all men will escape to an all-male subculture—and that our society will no longer reproduce. Melissa and Julie are parents, but it is true there are far fewer surprise births among same-sex pairs. But this threat is actually quite ridiculous: by far most human beings are heterosexually oriented, and will remain so. More than 95 percent of twentieth-century Americans marry heterosexually sometime in their lives—and even more simply live together at some point. At the beginning of the Reformation, approximately 40 percent of all women were single (especially in Germanic central Europe—half spinsters, half widows); 15.9 percent of the women and 12.1 percent of the men in one eighteenth-century American Quaker community never married. Ours is a rampantly marrying society: the very small percentage of us who partner with the same sex do not threaten the tribe.
The point here is that same-sex marriage is neither precisely like, nor precisely unlike, the out-marriage taboo that our laws have so firmly rejected as unjust. Only two things are truly comparable: first, the more that social equality seems possible, the more hysterical the threats against it become; and second, just as it was a step toward social justice when all the United States recognized my uncle’s marriage to my aunt, so it would be a step toward social justice for the West to recognize my marriage to Madeline.
Marrying In: Protecting the Family
What about the in-marrying taboo? Is same-sex marriage like incest, something that we still agree must be prohibited lest the tribe be permanently polluted? The answer depends on what the incest taboo is for.
Say the word “incest” in conversation today, and—unless you hang out with anthropologists—most of your listeners’ minds will skip to the sexual abuse of children. Late twentieth-century prosecutors invoke incest laws only as an extra-nasty charge against child-rapists, so that most of us think of “incest” as a synonym for daddy-dearest forcing himself on his fifth-grader. But the debauching of children was not what horrified our ancestors when a twelve-year-old was married to her wealthy uncle, or an eight-year-old was sent to live with her fiancé. How did “incest” come to mean violations of consent more than violations of consanguinity? How can a word so fundamental as “incest”—a word hissing with horror, a word from which everyone recoils—have almost entirely changed its connotations? If the violation of children was not the sin that worried our ancestors, what did?
The theme has some startling variations. Some tribal societies allow a man to marry his younger sisters, although not his older ones; others, like the Egyptians, allow royal sibs to marry each other—considering it natural that childhood intimacy should grow into marital intimacy, and equally natural that royalty should not marry someone of lower status. On the other hand, many societies have far more comprehensive incest codes than our own, such as the complicated rule of cross-cousin marriage: you must marry cousins by your father’s sister or mother’s brother, but you must never marry cousins by your father’s brother or mother’s sister, which would be incest.
Then there are the Old Testament Hebrews, that notoriously clannish bunch. The anthropologists call them endogamous: they enforced muscular rules against marrying foreigners—but had only the barest of rules against marrying within the family. Their founding pair, Abraham and Sarah, shared a father. That marriage was not considered incest: in a world in which your father’s various wives raised children in separate tents, sib-marriage was incest only if you two shared a womb, and therefore an upbringing. Remember that Jacob married a pair of sisters, Rachel and Leah, whose children presumably married each other. After they fled Sodom (and watched their mother turn into a pillar of salt for looking back), Lot’s daughters apparently thought that keeping the tribe safe from the foreign hordes was pretty darn important—because they got their father drunk and into bed with them, so that he fathered their children.
Seen from today’s genetic point of view, the Leviticus incest rules—directed only at men—seem entirely arbitrary. Yes, there’s a long list of women forbidden to a man because “none of you shall approach to any that is near kin to him, to uncover their nakedness: I am the Lord.” But—surprise!—a man’s daughter and nieces are not banned, although his aunt and his brothers’ or father’s wives are. Why? One scholar explains that a daughter is her father’s sexual property: he can use, sell, or give her away. But his brother’s wife was some other man’s sexual property. What counted was the need, in a clannish world, for brothers to stay unified and to refrain from muddling the ancestral line, their sperm incestuously touching in one womb.
There was one interesting exception: the rule called “levirate.” If a man died and left a child, the widow was forbidden to the surviving brothers as incestuous. But if the same man died without fathering a child, his surviving next-in-line brother had to marry the widow and create a child to bear his brother’s name. Onan’s sin was refusing to impregnate his dead brother’s childless widow, refusing to work the family property—her uterus. The only escape clause the Hebrews gave the brother who refused his responsibility was a formal ceremony in which—in Deuteronomy, at least—the widow got to spit in his face. Over the years, as the tribe grew into a people, the Jews slowly expanded the rules against marrying in (
a man who touched his daughter, for instance, was punished by burning)—although not as enthusiastically as they enforced the rule against marrying out.
In-marriage let your family consolidate its property and power: if your grandchildren married each other, your inheritance stayed intact and your bloodline was never diluted. And so the Old Testament Hebrews and the early medieval Jews—with their in-marrying habits and their skimpy incest rules—were far from exceptional. The Romans allowed first cousins to marry, while the early Germanic clans gave the nod to uncle/niece marriages. Unofficially, Roman patriarchs and their slave-daughters, or the patriarch’s legal son and his slave half-sisters, were notorious for their liaisons, which couldn’t be incest since they had no legal relationship as kin.
You can guess what the early Christians thought about this all-in-the-family attitude toward orifices and wombs, property and power. When they weren’t out-and-out rejecting this tainted world by declaring celibacy, they were vehemently denouncing all this incest—and radicalizing the marriage rules.