Steve's Soapbox

Friday, September 17, 2004

History of "Religious Extremists" Overplaying Their Hand

Here's one example ! Note the Almighty God quote.

Loving vs Virginia

Presented here is the actual text of the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Loving v. Virginia, the case which overturned the laws against interracial marriage still in effect as late as 1967 in 16 states. Many other states had enacted such laws in previous years, but had repealed them by the time of the Loving Decision.

The case is not only about intermarriage, but also, about how this country defined people in terms of "race", for not only did the Virginia statute in question prohibit the intermarriage of "whites" with "coloreds" and American Indians, it also assigned multiracial people to one or the other of these groups (but never to more than one or to a separate mixed category), depending upon the degree and type of mixture.

A white person was someone with no trace of any but "Caucasian blood", with the exception of a person who had 1/16 or less of American Indian ancestry (and no other non-white ancestry), an allowance notably covering some wealthy and well-respected descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. A black person was anyone with any "ascertainable" negro blood, the classic expression of the infamous "one-drop-rule". An American Indian was anyone with at least 1/4 Indian ancestry, or anyone with at least 1/4 Indian blood and no more than 1/16 "Negro" blood and who was also a member of an Indian tribe.

The 25th Anniversary of the Loving Decision was commemorated by AMEA in 1992 at the Loving Conference. A movie for television was made in 1996 dramatizing the story of the Lovings, starring Timothy Hutton, Lela Rochon and Ruby Dee. For more information about this film, here is the link to the Internet Movie Data Base: Mr.& Mrs.Loving

NOTE: The text reproduced here has been abridged to make for easier reading. To read the full text, go to any law library and find the case using the case citations below.
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RICHARD PERRY LOVING et ux., Appellants,
v.
VIRGINIA
388 US 1, 18 L ed 2d 1010, 87 S Ct 1817
Argued April 10, 1967. Decided June 12, 1967.

OPINION OF THE COURT

Mr. Chief Justice Warren delivered the opinion of the Court.

This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment.

In June 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws. Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings returned to Virginia and established their marital abode in Caroline County. At the October Term, 1958, the Circuit Court of Caroline County, a grand jury issued an indictment charging the Lovings with violating Virginia's ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that:

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

After their convictions, the Lovings took up residence in the District of Columbia. On November 6, 1963, they filed a motion in the state trial court to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence on the ground that the statutes which they had violated were repugnant to the Fourteenth Amendment. The motion not having been decided by October 28, 1964, the Lovings instituted a class action in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia requesting that a three-judge court be convened to declare the Virginia antimiscegenation statutes unconstitutional and to enjoin state officials from enforcing their convictions. On January 22, 1965, the state trial judge denied the motion to vacate the sentences, and the Lovings perfected an appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia. On February 11, 1965, the three-judge District Court continued the case to allow the Lovings to present their constitutional claims to the highest state court.
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These statutes also deprive the Lovings of liberty without due process of law in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. 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.

source: http://www.ameasite.org/loving.asp
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House candidate uses Bible to defend Southern slavery

by Phillip Rawls -- Associated Press, May 5, 1996
MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- A white state senator running for Congress wrote a speech in which he argued that slavery is justified by the Bible and was good for blacks.
"People who are bitter and hateful about slavery are obviously bitter and hateful against God and his word, because they reject what God says and embrace what mere humans say concerning slavery," Charles Davidson wrote.
Davidson, 61, a Republican from Jasper, Ala. had prepared the speech for a Senate debate Tuesday over his proposal to fly the Confederate battle flag over the Capitol. The measure was tabled before he had a chance to speak, but he passed out copies later.
"It's sad to think we have anyone who has that type of thinking in 1996. That may have been appropriate in the 1930's and 1940's, but not in 1996," said state Rep. Laura Hall, chairwoman of the Legislative Black Caucus.
Davidson cited the Book of Leviticus -- "You may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations that are around you" -- and quoted 1 Timothy as saying slaves should "regard their own masters as worthy of all honor."
"The incidence of abuse, rape, broken homes and murder are 100 times greater, today, in the housing projects than they ever were on the slave plantations in the old south," he wrote.
"The truth is that nowhere on the face of the earth, in all that time, were servants better treated or better loved than they were in the Old South by white, black, Hispanic and Indian slave owners."
Davidson, a restaurateur elected to the state Senate in 1994, is running for the GOP nomination for the U.S. House seat being vacated by Democrat Tom Bevill. The primary is June 4.
"The issue is not race. It's Southern heritage. I'm on a one-man leadership crusade to get the truth out about what out Southern heritage is all about," he said at a news conference Thursday.

source: http://personalwebs.myriad.net/steveb/slavery.html
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Preventing Women the right to vote by abusing GOD's Word

The struggle for women's suffrage in America began in the 1820s with the writings of Fanny Wright. In her book, Course of Popular Lectures (1829) and in the Free Enquirer Wright not only advocated women being given the vote but the abolition of slavery, free secular education, birth control and more liberal divorce laws.

Wright received little support for her views and the next significant development did not take place until 1840 when two members of the Society of Friends, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, travelled to London as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Both women were furious when they, like the British women at the convention, were refused permission to speak at the meeting. Stanton later recalled: "We resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and form a society to advocate the rights of women."

However, it was not until 1848 that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organised the Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. Stanton's resolution that it was "the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the sacred right to the elective franchise" was passed, and this became the focus of the group's campaign over the next few years.

for the entire article visit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAsuffrage.htm