Obviously this isn't really anything new or anything people probably haven't said a million times already...

I had forgotten to mention a really fascinating conversation we had in our Women in American History class, about Miscegenation Laws. While the conversation started out as a reaction to the text within our textbook itself, it turned into a discussion of modern politics on gay marriage. We were discussing civil unions and "marriage" itself, and the right to property, making health desicions, etc. Because some of the stuff Miscegenation Laws said just came off as way.... way too familiar. Especially when we read a couple old religious sermons from when slavery was still legal  that gave biblical reasons for slavery as an institution, the white supremacy over other races, and why interracial marriages could not be allowed... it didn't seem all that much different than some of the debates the class as a whole had heard over gay marriage today.

From Peggy Pascoe's essay  "Ophelia Paquet, a Tillamook Indian Wife: Miscegenation Laws and the Privileges of Property"

"In American Law, marriage provided the glue which allowed for the transmission of property from husbands to wives and their chidlren; miscegenation law kept property within racial boundries by invalidating marraiges between white men and women of color..." 
Or people of any race states felt like, including Native American, Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiin, Filipinos...

"Miscegenation law played on this connection [between the words 'property' and 'propriety'] by drawing a sharp line between 'legitimate marriage' on one hand and 'illicit sex' on the other, then defining all interracial relationships as illicit sex.'" 

I was interested to see that the author herself made this connection in her essay as well, after the similarities had struck me while reading it:
"More than a generation after the demise of miscegenation laws...the drawing of exclusionary lines around marriage [continues]... The most prominent-- though hardly the only-- victims are lesbian and gay couples, who point out that the sex classifications currently embedded  in marriage law operate in much the same way that the race classifications embedded in miscegenation laws once did: that is, they allow courts to categorize same-sex relationships as illicit sex rather than legitimate marriage and they allow courts to exclude same-sex couples from the property benefits of marraige, which now include everything from tax advantages to medical insurance coverage."

Either way, this is just some food for thought, because the conversation in class (which took up nearly the entire class period in that 'let's talk about issues and not homework way that I really love) really, really struck a chord in me somewhere. It leads back to my feelings that I feel that private religious institutions have a right to deny marriages to anybody they want-- but the government can't. Are racial classifications really that different from gender/sex classifications?
Anyway, this is not really to start up another gay marriage debate on lj, but I really couldn't get this essay out of my mind.