Saturday, October 17, 2009

Love and Justice

My jaw almost dropped when I heard this story out of Louisiana. A parish judge has refused to marry an interracial couple.
Tangipahoa Parish Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell - that's right, I'm naming him here, Keith Bardwell - says that while he has no racial animosity toward anyone - Bardwell, who is white, insists that he has several black friends - he believes that interracial marriages are doomed to failure and that he can't perform them in good conscience. And so he chose not to wed Terrence McKay, who is black, and Beth Humphrey, who is white.
What is this, 1952? This reminds me of the argument that God meant the races to be apart and so set them on different continents, but for an "accident of history." If God didn't want to allow the races to live together, how did God allow the formation of America? You know, the country God blessed, the land that we love?
Speaking of love, this Louisiana couple, who did get married elsewhere, really do love each other and they're looking forward to their life together. They wed after they found a judge in Louisiana who, unlike Bardwell, knows that the Supreme Court threw out state anti-miscegenation laws in 1967. One other insult Bardwell made - he was afraid that the children would suffer for being of mixed parentage.
Mixed? As in one of each? A father and a mother? Well, as I recall, there was this kid from Hawaii who was the product of an interracial marriage, and he turned out alright.
In fact, he's living in a big mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington and just won the Nobel Peace Prize.

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