Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Marriage

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27650743

I was listening to the audio from Keith Olbermann's "Countdown" from yesterday this morning. The "special comment" segment was about Proposition 8 in California. It really touched me for some reason. This jumped out at me:
I keep hearing this term "re-defining" marriage. If this country hadn't re-defined marriage, black people still couldn't marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal in 1967. 1967.

I decided to look up which states kept these laws on the books for so long. I found a wikipedia entry for the laws:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws

I was surprised to find that Filipinos ("Malays")were included in some of the laws for "Races" banned from marrying whites. By my count, in the early '60s, when my parents were married, there were still 8 states that would have prohibited that marriage.

Now my parents have 11 grandchildren. I have to hope that some day they will look back, shocked at how wrong the laws were back in 2008

2 comments:

Thomas said...

I was also moved by Olbermann's comment. He has a real gift at getting to the heart of things.

mikep said...

yeah, i gotta stop listening to these things that make me tear up at work!