** Previously recorded by Phyllis Schlafly // June 2015 **
Supporters of same-sex marriage like to compare themselves to civil rights activists of earlier generations. They argue that protecting traditional marriage is like the segregation fought by Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. There is one particular Supreme Court case that they bring up over and over to make this point. That case is Loving v. Virginia; in 1967 the Court ruled that bans on interracial marriage are unconstitutional.
Same-sex marriage advocates say they only want the court to do for them what the Loving case did for interracial marriage, but the comparison doesn’t hold up. The National Coalition of Black Pastors and Christian Leaders makes this point in an amicus brief sent to the Supreme Court. This brief refutes the claims of gay activists to be today’s civil rights heroes. Gays and lesbians never suffered anything like the discrimination that oppressed African-Americans in the days of slavery and Jim Crow. Those horrors led to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees to all citizens the “equal protection of the laws.” It’s ridiculous to claim now that this language cancels out state laws protecting traditional marriage. Loving v. Virginia is being misinterpreted by same-sex marriage advocates to support their cause. They fail to see that the Loving case was about race, not about marriage. The court struck down bans on interracial marriage because race has nothing to do with marriage. As the Sixth Circuit Court rightly noted when it upheld state marriage laws, “When the Loving [case] and its progeny used the word marriage, they did not redefine the term but accepted its traditional meaning.” The simple truth is that a ban on interracial marriage and protections for traditional marriage are not the same thing at all, and today’s gay-marriage activists absolutely do not deserve to wrap themselves in the mantle of civil rights activists.
