Offhand, I know about a dozen interracial couples — some of them are in my family. Republican Senator Mike Braun thinks it would be fine to dissolve their marriages.
In a media call on Tuesday, U.S Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind) said that the U.S. Supreme Court was wrong to legalize interracial marriage in a ruling that stretches back to Loving v. Virginia in 1967.
According to Braun, the decision should not have been made by the country’s highest court and instead been left to individual states. Even though some states had made interracial marriage illegal prior to the Supreme Court ruling.
They’ve discovered this handy circumlocution. They aren’t going to come right out and say that interracial marriage is wrong…oh no, they’re just going to say that we ought to permit states (that is, Republican lawmakers in some states) the right to destroy marriages, if they want. They’re playing the same game with abortion.
Come on, no one is fooled. Braun is a closet racist who has found a not-so-cunning way to signal to other racists that he’s on their side.
These regressive douchebags really do want to take the USA backwards and remove every last skerrick of social progress made since the Civil War and even before don’t they?
Again with the “states’ rights” dodge. If that’s the desire of the Republican Party, then the U.S. Supreme Court should be dissolved, with America devolving into an enormous city-state system in which slavery is reintroduced and the Hand Maid’s Tale becomes the rule book for women.
Wouldn’t you first have to define the exact “race” of each partner? Here’s a helpful chart to start out.
Oh, he’s threatening me with a good time, because that would affect dear Clearance Thomas! Poor dear Clearance would be ever so confused, because he thinks that he’s not a token and he won’t get spent….
That story is two years old, and he walked it back immediately. Nothing to see here, folks.
I wonder if he is related to Eva Braun?
Civil rights are not subject to state law for good reason, but it’s not surprising that a maga infested white man is openly spouting Christo-fascist nonsense about race mixing.
Under this logic, Mitch McConnell, trumpelstiltskin, and Shady Pants are all getting their marriages annulled and their wives deported, though I suppose that the bigot from Illinois merely intended to denigrate the marriage of Vice President Harris.
Argh, I do hate the modern technology that changes Indiana into Illinois.
I doubt that walking back this statement means that the Senator isn’t really a white male supremacist who is doing his best to empower fascists. He also loves banning women’s reproductive rights, stacking SCOTUS with corrupt judges, and tried to help steal the White House for rump.
The old white men of this country are an active threat to democracy.
I hope he doesn’t become Governor
Strangely enough, that would affect two of the candidates running for president of the USA today.
.1. JD Vance can say good bye to his wife and kids. He is married to an Indian American woman and his kids are half Indian.
.2. Kamala Harris is half Indian and half Black.
She isn’t a childless cat lady but Senator Braun would make her into one.
.3. Former president Obama is now illegal, being half white and half Kenyan.
So are his kids.
Braun wants to make 10% of the US population into an illegal under class. I guess.
Who knows, maybe he wants to set up camps and kill them all with Xyklon B gas.
With someone that twisted and filled with hate, anything is possible.
He is running out of time here.
The mixed race population is the fastest growing demographic in the USA. In a few decades or maybe more, mixes will be the majority of the population.
Mmmm. How could you in this day and age you even do that. How could you legally define race? I know the US had discrimination that try to do that (not sure how they go about it). But I think it is a bad idea (instead of racial quotas, they should have quotas for disadvantaged students). But race is not a well defined concept. We are all mongrels.
I was reading on the web about the future of the red states and it hit me: they are recreating the pre-Civil Rights South! Think about it, the South before the 1960s had:
1) Entrenched one-party rule
2) based on an embittered white majority
3) who kept returning the same sleazy politicians, election after election, partly to take advantage of the senility system in the Senate
4) those pols never did anything real for their constituents because if the whites weren’t so poor they wouldn’t be so embittered.
5) Racism was used to keep the whites from joining with the blacks with whom they actually had more real interests in common than with the rich southern whites who ran the South and despised the poor whites as “white trash.”
6) It wasn’t just racism, legal tricks (Jim Crow laws) were used to keep the opposition from voting.
Sounds like future red states to me except that the legal tricks will rely more on gerrymandering and ensuring that the election officials are corrupt.
I was reading on the web about the future of the red states and it hit me: they are recreating the pre-Civil Rights South! Think about it, the South before the 1960s had:
1) Entrenched one-party rule
2) based on an embittered white majority
3) who kept returning the same sleazy politicians, election after election, partly to take advantage of the senility system in the Senate
4) those pols never did anything real for their constituents because if the whites weren’t so poor they wouldn’t be so embittered.
5) Racism was used to keep the whites from joining with the blacks with whom they actually had more real interests in common than with the rich southern whites who ran the South and despised the poor whites as “white trash.”
6) It wasn’t just racism, legal tricks (Jim Crow laws) were used to keep the opposition from voting.
Sounds like future red states to me except that the legal tricks will rely more on gerrymandering and ensuring that the election officials are corrupt.
” he walked it back immediately. Nothing to see here, folks.” What’s that about “saying the quiet part out loud?”
John Harshman@5 – Yes, the article is two years old. However, as long as he is running for, or in, public office, the public needs to be reminded of what garbage his opinions are. “Walking back” his comments, after being publicly criticized, doesn’t mean he gets to toss them down the memory hole.
The couple in “Loving” were married in another State. The issue was the State they moved to did not recognize inter-racial marriage and saw them as un-married by the move. It violated the full faith&credit clause of the Constitution but the Supreme Cort has never been willing to enforce that States’ rights bugaboo. The “let the states decide” argument always runs into this Constitutional conflict.
I”m willing to accept that he was confused about what Loving vs. Virginia was. His denial was pretty clear.
In a statement to The Washington Post after the conference call, Braun said he “misunderstood” the reporter’s questions on Loving and stressed that he opposes racism.
“I misunderstood a line of questioning that ended up being about interracial marriage,” Braun said. “Let me be clear on that issue — there is no question the Constitution prohibits discrimination of any kind based on race, that is not something that is even up for debate, and I condemn racism in any form, at all levels and by any states, entities, or individuals.”
There are plenty of issues to beat on him for, but this isn’t one of them. Two years old and repudiated at the time.
OK.
Don’t forget though that there are still many in the fundie xian/GOP who do oppose racial mixing, especially interracial marriage.
Those are the Great Replacement theorists among others.
Growing up in the South during the 50s/60s I heard a lot about “states rights” all the friggin’ time. There were billboards on the side of the highways about it. However, the whole “states rights” gambit, whether about race, abortion, immigration, etc, is just a ruse to give power to the states which are more vulnerable to control by the rich. That’s just as true today as it was before 1865. The power split between states and the Fed is one of the oldest debates in this country based entirely on this notion that the states should be treated as quasi-independent political entities. It’s the reason we have the “Electoral College” which lets the “states”, i.e. delegations controlled by the rich, overrule the popular vote because they don’t trust “we the people” to vote the right people into office.
John Harshman @ #15
Remember those Trump Supreme Court nominees who swore to the US Senate that Roe v Wade was established law? Like the preacher at the Philadelphia church, I don’t trust these people. They will say whatever they think they need to say to get what they really want: power for the very rich.
@2: Noooooo! Don’t give them ideas!
Oh, wait, they’ll never come to this godforsaken, godless place for ideas.
• • •
<sarcasm> But racism is not Christian. Deuteronomy 24:16 (among many, many other references) demands that sons shall not be punished for the sins (some translations “iniquities”) of their fathers — and surely the biggest iniquity of all is being born of the “wrong” race! (Followed by being born with the “wrong” citizenship.) Therefore, good Christians must reject racism, and it’s an actual sin to identify oneself as a “Christian nationalist” who treats accidents of birth as iniquities worthy of punishment because that insults the name and word of Christ and his disciples. </sarcasm>
If anyone is interested, here is the earliest version of the Virginia law, passed in 1662, that the court ruling overturned: “And that if any christian shall committ Fornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the Fines imposed by the former act.” Several other Virginia laws in the 17th century specifically distinguished between “Christians” and “negroes.” So the original form of Colonial racial prejudice was not racial in origin, but religious.
17th century English court rulings that upheld slavery laws cited that “negroes” were pagans and therefore Christians could lawfully enslave them. In 1677 (Butts vs. Penny, two separate lawsuits with the same name are involved here, involving two separate groups of slaves) that “negroes were infidels, and the subjects of an infidel prince, and are usually bought and sold in America as merchandise … negroes being usually bought and sold among merchants, as merchandise, and also being infidels, there might be a property in them sufficient to maintain trover …” and in 1694 (Gelly/Gilly vs Cleve) that “trover will lie for a negro boy, for they are heathens, and therefore a man may have property in them, and that the court without averment made, will take notice that they are heathens.”
Old news:
Posted: Mar 22, 2022 / 06:24 PM EDT
Updated: Mar 22, 2022 / 06:26 PM EDT
While he should be dragged for this; we do need to make sure we’re not jut blindly following outrage bait.
@20, wsierichs, who wrote,
Rhetorical question: So once a negro converted to Christianity they were no longer a slave, instant manumission?
Since that didn’t happen, I’d submit that the law which uses a racial characteristic to determine a person’s religion is definitely racist in origin. Not that religion doesn’t play it’s part, but it doesn’t have to be one or the other, it can be both. In other words, the law was used to justify an existing desire to own people of another race rather than the cause (origin) of such a desire.
Naw.
This is just flat out wrong.
That the Black Africans were non-xians was just an excuse.
.1. The newly arrived Africans very quickly lost their original culture and language.
They also very quickly converted to xianity or were converted to xianity. A form of xianity that claimed they were natural slaves because of the curse of Ham and other made up reasons, equally just an excuse.
They never let xians slaves go because they were xians.
.2. The white American colonists never enslaved the Native Americans, Asians, or South Asian Indians, who were and many still are…non-xians.
Um. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_among_Native_Americans_in_the_United_States#European_enslavement_of_Native_Americans
The white slave owners often used the bible to justify slavery.
This continues until,…a few minutes ago in some places.
The white Europeans didn’t need a reason to enslave people. It is simple economics. Money and power.
The rationalizations aren’t all that good because that is all they are. They weren’t overly concerned with making it sound reasonable.
Catholics had several, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dum_Diversas#Content
(Ex Cathedra)
Best as I can make it, racism is a perennial type of xenophobia exhibited in all cultures in all times.
cf. this word: Hibernophobia
Don’t forget Braun’s running mate for Lt. Gov!
IndyStar
IndyStar
Indiana Capitol Chronicle
He was a pastor for 15 years—a position both of Bible awareness and public speaking—and that’s the best drivel he can come up with to justify Christian nationalism.
People like him will define ‘racist’ to mean an unreasonable belief that one’s own race is better than it really is.
But these people also “know”, for a “fact”, that “White People Are Better Than Brown/Black Ones”, so acting on that “fact” isn’t racist, it’s either “telling it like it is” or “being real” and they fully expect to not only not be penalized, but ADMIRED for it.
And, of course, by their definition, a black man who thinks they are the equal of a white one is being racist.
No sense of self awareness at all.
As an FYI: The word “slave” comes from “Slav.” That’s because in the Dark Ages/Middle Ages, Christians captured so many pagan Slavic peoples in several centuries of relentless wars and raids ((their pagan status being the reason for the wars), then sold the captives info forced labor, many into the Middle East, that Slav became synonymous with forced labor. By modern racial definitions, Slavs and other Europeans that Christians killed or enslaved in a thousand year genocide against the pagan peoples of Europe, after Christians were given control of the Roman Empire, were all “white.” Race was not a factor, only religion. That’s because refusal to convert to Christianity was seen as choosing Satan over God/Jesus. When pagans made choices to hold to their traditional beliefs, that made them Satan worshipers, and therefore intrinsically evil.
I did not quote other Colonial laws and related material, but up into the 18th century, “Christian” and “Negro” were often juxtaposed. “Race” did not enter these laws until sometime in the 18th century, which basically was an attempt by Christians to justify the enslavement or killing of dark-skinned pagans all over the world (I call it the “Slav treatment”) using the newly developed “scientific” ideas of early biologists to classify all animal species, including humans. The obvious physical differences were explained by the concept of differing races.
In the 19th century, Christians extended the idea of race to Jews to “explain” why they were so resistant to conversion. It was obvious that they had to be a physically/biologically inferior version of humanity, or else they were have recognized the moral and spiritual superiority of Christianity and Christians. Which was why only Christians could be allowed to control governments; Jews were obviously a constant threat to corrupt a Christian nation. That’s the origin of the modern Christian nation movement. That’s why European Christians – Nazis/Germans were only a part of this action – murdered some six million Jews in World War II.
If anyone doubts the link between Christianity and slavery, pre-racism, explain the following 1664 Maryland law: “That all Negroes or other slaves already within the Province And all Negroes and other slaves to bee hereafter imported into the Province shall serve Durante Vita. [for life] And all Children born of any Negro or other slave shall be Slaves as their ffathers were for the terme of their lives And forasmuch as divers freeborne English women forgettfull of their free Condicion and to the disgrace of our Nation doe intermarry with Negro Slaves by which alsoe divers suites may arise touching the Issue of such woemen and a great damage doth befall the Masters of such Negros for prevention whereof for deterring such freeborne women from such shamefull Matches Bee itt further Enacted …” By law, all freeborn English men and women had to be Christians. There was no such thing legally as a non-Christian English man/woman. So this means enough Christian women were marrying black men that it alarmed Colonial officials. If racism existed, why would this even have been a problem? The original issue was religion, not race. And yes, Colonial officials recognized the problem of conversion, which technically meant slaves should go free, so they passed laws to prevent that. The legal justification is too complex for here, but it was certainly part of the slavery issue and conversions were not allowed to justify emancipation.
Podcast/Transcript: Scene on Radio – S2E2 Seeing White, How Race Was Made
I wish this had turned out shorter. Trimmed what I could.
Podcast/Transcript: Scene on Radio – S2E3 Made in America
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Podcast/Transcript: Scene on Radio – S2E4 On Crazy We Built a Nation
Podcast/Transcript: Scene on Radio – S2E10 Citizen Thind
This is simply false. In the index of Alan Taylor’s American Colonies there are multiple page references for “slavery of Indians”. This was carried out on the largest scale by Spanish colonists in Mexico Peru and the Caribbean, but even if you intended by “white American colonists” only those in English/British colonies, enslaving Indians was by no means rare. Perhaps most destructively, Indian tribal groups were recruited and armed as slave-catchers, their quarry being both escaped Black slaves, and members of other tribal groups, who in turn sought guns to defend themselves – and paid for them by capturing members of yet other groups.
Another similar origin narrative.
Article: University of Pennsylvania Law Review – Making Indians White (2011)
page 1470
page 1473
@Sky Captain, numerous posts,
Interesting. So up until the 1667 Virginia law, Africans who became Christians could no longer be slaves because of English Common law which forbids Christians from being slaves, and some slaves were freed due to that law. I did not know that. It does echo the law I have heard from some Islamic countries which states that a man who can recite the opening sentence of the Koran in Arabic can no longer be a slave. I don’t feel too embarrassed about knowing this as the period when this could occur was fairly short.
That being said, it is still clear that racism as we understand it existed during this period, whether it be against Native Americans, Negros, or Moors, because as soon as it became clear that the law concerning Christian belief would be enforced the law was changed. This also shows that religion was used as an excuse for the discrimination, not the cause of it. As soon as that excuse became untenable, that excuse was dropped.
It’s probably worth keeping in mind that we are taught racism from a biological perspective, but the (incorrect) idea of divergent species of humans didn’t occur until we had developed the idea of species in the first place. Racism developed long before the idea of separate species; but still dealt with stereotypes of skin color, the shapes of noses or hair, and included what we now consider cultural aspects like clothing styles, hygiene or other behavior, and religion.
Laws follow the beliefs of a society. Bear-baiting became illegal not because a few judges felt it was cruel, but because enough members of society argued in front of the judges that it was cruel. We could be more specific and say that laws follow the beliefs of the powerful members of a society, as that is true most of the time. Sometimes the powerful are overruled. While I do not know the arguments in the Virginia legislature in 1667 which led to religion no longer being a consideration in determining who can be a slave, I can say that the law would not have been enacted if there were not enough legislators who believed there were (non-religious) differences between themselves and Negros. A difference great enough to justify one group of people owning another.
That these laws led to greater and greater legal distinctions, and embedded these prejudices in the laws of the USA, is deplorable, but not entirely unexpected. But I claim it would be inaccurate to say that the belief in White Supremacy started here. That belief already existed, before the laws codified that belief.