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No excuse for racial bigotry

This article is more than 14 years old
A US justice of the peace has refused to marry an interracial couple because he fears for the children. It's cynical, defeatist and illogical

Just when we thought America was finally "post-racial," this happens:

A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.
Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long. 'I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way,' Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. 'I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.' Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed-race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

I am certainly relieved that Bardwell allows his "piles" of black friends to use his bathroom, but I thought we sorted out the whole interracial marriage controversy more than 40 years ago with Loving v Virginia, the landmark 1967 case where the United States supreme sourt declared the state of Virginia's miscegenation laws, and all race-based restrictions against marriage, unconstitutional.

Laws protect against bias and can change people's hearts and minds, but some hearts and minds come along more slowly than others.

What bothers me about the not-uncommon-enough "God! Will someone think of the children?" argument against interracial partnering is the tremendous failure in logic it entails. There are plenty forms of bigotry still around in these modern times – racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia … I could go on. The only way to shield children from intolerance is not to have them at all. Or, of course, the people like Bardwell who make this argument could, just stop being so bigoted and, thus, make the world a better place for all of us.

But it's not just that this thinking is illogical, it is also cynical and defeatist. Cynical in its belief that society is inherently hateful and will never change, but also in its failure to recognise that even marginalised people can triumph – that every day brown people and biracial people succeed despite the bias against them that still exists. And since when is the appropriate response to a wrong acquiescence? Since when do we concede defeat to bigotry? If Bardwell had his way, if we all gave in to "the way things are" and denied ourselves equality and the freedom to live and love as we choose, I daresay we might never have reached a day when one of those poor mixed kids that Bardwell expresses faux concern for could live in the White House as president of the United States.

The American Civil Liberties Union, in a letter to the Louisiana Judiciary Committee, asked the body to investigate Bardwell. The letter called for "the most severe sanctions available, because such blatant bigotry poses a substantial threat of serious harm to the administration of justice."

And this must happen if we are to demonstrate that Bardwell's cynicism and assent to social wrongs has no purchase in this society. We may not yet be post-racial, but we have moved a long way past Bardwell's sort of thinking.

 

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