On Tuesday, Joe Biden signed the Defense of Marriage Act. I enjoyed his speech; he was in full Dark Brandon mode in his mirrored sunglasses. The Act itself is not the full-throated protection for marriage equality many people would like to see, but it does draw a line in the sand if
Obergefell, the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, falls prey to the same line of reasoning about privacy rights the Supreme Court used to reverse 50 years of precedent on legal abortion. That is the logical endpoint of the argument Justice Clarence Thomas made in his concurrence in
Dobbs, the case that reversed
Roe v. Wade and ended women’s right to choose.
Biden handed the pen he used to sign the Act to Kamala Harris, whose marriage to a white man would have been illegal before
Loving v. Virginia, also potentially under attack if the Court lets its decision in
Dobbs fall off the slippery slope to
its logical endpoint.
Loving is a relatively recent case—states were not required to permit interracial marriages before 1967, when a unanimous Supreme Court held that distinctions drawn according to race were generally “odious to a free people” and that Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Loving involved two Virginia residents, Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, who went to the District of Columbia to get married. Upon their return to Virginia, they were charged with violating the state’s anti-miscegenation statute, which banned interracial marriage, and were each sentenced to spend one year in custody.
The nine white men on the Supreme Court in 1967 understood, in this case, how important their role in protecting people’s rights was. Virginia argued that the law applied equally to Blacks and whites, so it passed muster under a rational purpose test. But the court, conservatives and liberals, held that the law’s sole purpose was “invidious” racial discrimination and that it could not withstand the strict scrutiny the Court was required to subject it to in making its decision.
Today, that sort of moral certainty no longer exists on the Court. So passing a law that backstops
Obergefell and
Loving, requiring states to respect marriages if they were legally entered into in another state, is a last-ditch effort to make sure rights are protected. Sometimes a thing is bigger than what it appears to be. Despite the criticism that it doesn’t go far enough, this Act, in the final analysis, likely will be a big deal.
Biden admonished the crowd that it was all the same—attacks on Jews, Muslims, Blacks, the LGBTQ community—and that protecting these rights isn’t a partisan act but one that is fundamentally American. It’s fitting that this step was taken by Joe Biden, who, as Vice President, “accidentally” got ahead of Obama on marriage equality before
Obergefell was the law. Hearing Biden lecturing the country on the importance of this law, as well as additional steps he’s taking to tackle other types of hate like antisemitism and animus against Muslims, underlined the interconnectedness Biden sees between these issues and his commitment to confronting them. It was a big day.
This administration is doing things, both big and small, to protect civil rights. Small, unsung advances like Tuesday’s from DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which
convicted a 61-year-old Michigan man of hate crimes after he made death threats to Starbucks employees who wore Black Lives Matter T-shirts and placed a noose in a vehicle with an attached handwritten note that read, “An accessory to be worn with your ‘BLM’ t-shirt. Happy protesting!” On Wednesday, the Civil Rights Division extracted a
settlement from the Southern California city of Hesperia, to end practices that discriminated against Blacks and Latinos in housing.
You probably won’t read a lot about either one of these cases in the news. But that’s all the more reason to have confidence in a Justice Department that does the right thing to little or no fanfare. It’s not the public spotlight that matters. This administration is making lots of “good trouble.” John Lewis would be proud.
(full article online)
On Tuesday, Joe Biden signed the Defense of Marriage Act. I enjoyed his speech; he was in full Dark Brandon mode in his mirrored sunglasses. The Act itself is not the full-throated protection for marriage equality many people would like to see, but it does draw a line in the sand if
joycevance.substack.com
^^^
