I oppose marriage as an outdated, fascist concept. Originally developed as a way of keeping track of the population - who married whom, whose babies were the milkman's, et cetera - it is now obsolete and little more than ceremony in this progressive, globalized world. This being said, people are going to want their ceremony and baubles anyway, so why for the love of goddess is it so difficult to grant this frivolity to any consensual couple?

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace who shall soon be promoted to the ranks of those people who I thoroughly despise though I have never met them, denied marriage to an interracial couple on the grounds that their children would find it difficult to fit into either of their parents' cultures. Perhaps I am appalled by this idea because I live in Montgomery County, a diverse region if I ever saw one, but I have always understood that New Orleans is decently multicultural in its own right. Am I too naive in thinking that urban America should, by 2009, have evolved beyond such bigotry that prevents a child from having multiple roots and being proud of them all? As the child of a Frenchman and a Lebanese American, I can confirm that multiculturalism is actually pretty neat - of course there will be some searching for one's identity, with possibly some weltschmerz thrown in, but show me a a person who has never experienced existentialist angst and lunch will be on me. Though the couple found another justice who went ahead and married them, the issue still stands that someone had the audacity to judge the ultimate result of a marriage on the simple basis of race.

By the way: You don't need to be married to produce tiny terrors. And married couples don't always have children. The reasoning behind "their children would be unhappy" is, therefore, a steaming pile of sandworm dung.

Katie Schwartzmann, an ACLU attorney, referenced Loving vs. Virginia in her commentary on this issue. Loving vs. Virginia (1967) involved an interracial couple's fight for the right to marry, in which the Supreme Court declared the ban on interracial marriages unconstitutional:

"Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

And now, for the sake of the modern fight for freedom of marriage (which I had assumed had moved beyond racism by now), let's remove that "a person of another race" part.

Is it so difficult?

Reference:
Foster, Mary. "Interracial couple denied marriage license in La."Associated Press. Yahoo! News, 16 Oct. 2009. Web. 16 Oct. 2009.