This whole gay marriage controversy is simply ridiculous. Sedalina has one of the better takes on the topic (as well as some particularly ignorant feedback from readers), and also led me to do to a little Googling to find the following:
An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity
5. It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this act, the term “white person” shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons. All laws heretofore passed and now in effect regarding the intermarriage of white and colored persons shall apply to marriages prohibited by this act.
from the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924
Eugenic Laws Against Race Mixing
Paul Lombardo, University of Virginia
By 1915, twenty-eight states made marriages between “Negroes and white persons” invalid; six states included this prohibition in their constitutions…
The 1958 case of Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia initiated a challenge that would eventually overturn the law… By unanimous decision, in 1967 the [United States Supreme] Court struck down the Racial Integrity Act and similar laws of fifteen other states, saying: “[T]here can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause… 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.”
from the Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement
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