My wife and I saw Loving tonight. It was very personal for us because our state of AZ had had anti-miscegenation laws on the books until just a couple of years before we got married and our marriage was still illegal in 18 states after we got married in 1964. Had we traveled to one of those state or moved there and we had encountered a situation which would have brought us to the attention of the authorities, we could not have the integrity of our marriage guaranteed.
So when we saw what the Lovings went through, we understood. The most touching scene for me was when the A.C.L.U. attorney (there’s a reason conservatives hate the A.C.L.U.) asked richard Loving what he wanted him to say to the Supreme Court, Richard responded with the deepest truth: “Tell the judge I love my wife.”
The director wisely chose not to mention in the film the obvious parallel to gay marriage. I see that Bob Jones University maintained its ban on interracial dating on its campus through 2000. That cinches for me the fact that keeping people from marrying is a Bible-based doctrine. So the Hobby Lobby decision by SCOTUS says this: if one of these people owns a catering service we want to hire for our 55th anniversary and he objects on religious grounds to providing us the service, then his prejudice, Bible-based, will be indulged according to SCOTUS.
Conservatives argue that the owner of such a business should have the right to restrict his services to those people he wants to serve as long as he is willing to swallow the loss of business. But what about an employee who refuses to do his job for such a couple as us on those same grounds. If his boss, the owner, does not share his religious convictions on interracial marriage, must he honor his employee’s religious convictions, his sentiments, and reassign the job to someone else without endangering that employee’s standing?
Here is what we will wind up with if we have further decisions like Hobby Lobby: just as in India and many other countries, you will stay within your own group, based as it may be on ethnicity, language, religion, origin, race or whatever. No one will be faced with dealing with someone whose life choices bother them b/c everyone will be in his own compound, never dealing with someone different from him along any of those axes.
Now, where do you think that will lead? Will that make America great again?
Pat’s Polemics
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