On October 6th, 1971, John A. Wilkinson and Lorraine Mary Turner got married. The event is mostly forgotten today, as Wilkinson and Turner were two normal people who, by all accounts, went on to lead a normal life together. Their marriage would be entirely unremarkable but for the fact that it was the first legal interracial marriage to be performed in North Carolina since the state outlawed the practice in 1715.
North Carolina was not the only state to be hosting such novel weddings around this time. After the landmark Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia declared all anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, a slew of other states were forced to revise their law code to comply with the judicial mandate. They are worth listing individually--see if you notice a common denominator: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Of them all, only North Carolina filed a brief with the Supreme Court on behalf of the state of Virginia in support of maintaining anti-miscegenation laws.
Marx once famously noted that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”
The anti-miscegenation laws that once ruled the South were an indisputable tragedy, manifestations of the racist hysteria behind so much violence and vitriol and humiliation. Yesterday’s anti-marriage vote in North Carolina was little more than a farce. Certainly, anti-marriage warriors used the same tools as their bigoted predecessors to force their hate into the code of law: fear first and foremost; then lightly-veiled appeals to bigotry; and finally the crushing blow of raw, unadulterated loathing.
But this time these appeals rang hollow. Just as North Carolinians were lining up for the polls, Gallup published a new poll confirming that a majority of Americans support marriage equality. (Polls have been showing this for a year; we are now beyond the margin of error.) I need not remind readers of the recent victories in New York and Washington and New Hampshire, nor of the high-level government officials who have spoken out in support of marriage equality in recent days, nor of the irrefutable proof that this issue is utterly generational and, as compared to similar social movements in America, sliding with remarkable speed toward its inevitable conclusion.
For now, however, we have North Carolina to grapple with. What are we to make of this farce whose foregone conclusion has already dominated the media cycle for far too long? For one, we should all be surprised this vote didn’t happen eight years ago. North Carolina might easily have voted homophobia into its constitution along with its neighboring states during the 2004 debacle cooked up by Republicans to drive bigoted Southerners to the polls during that key election year, but by a fluke of fate, its legislature had remained in the hands of Democrats for 140 years. Now it has become an entirely red state, and this vote was one of the first items on the GOP’s agenda. Keep that in mind the next time you are tempted to write off a Republican friend’s voting patterns as a harmless foible on his part.
Yet we must also examine the vote in a broader historical and regional context, no matter how much it might make progressive Southerners wince. The South--let us deny it no longer--is largely backwards. Recall the states listed above whose racist anti-marriage laws were not overturned until 1967: all were in the traditional South, and all but three (Delaware, Missouri, and Oklahoma) are still considered Southern today. It is no surprise, then, that every state on that list has since voted to ban same-sex marriage, and most have also banned state recognition of any other kind of same-sex partnership. (North Carolina joins the latter club today.) This kind of behavior is regressive and bigoted and reprehensible and idiotic. It is, in other words, typical of the traditional South. It’s not very often one hears someone mutter “I hate gays” in the Northeast or the West anymore, but in the South, it is a common occurrence. (Trust me; I lived there for eighteen years.) Anti-gay activists in more liberal parts of the country have learned to couch their vitriol in euphemisms and doublespeak (“I am not anti-gay, I am pro-marriage”); in the South, it often comes spooling out in its purest, most hateful form.
It probably does not help that openly gay people don’t exactly grow on trees in the Deep South--though many residents probably wish they were hanging from them. It also doesn’t help that the South has stunningly low education rates and, let us concede, very high religiosity. But I am no longer convinced that religion stands as an impediment to progress; for as many Baptist churches who shepherded their flocks to the polls yesterday with Bibles and NOM propaganda, nearly as many Lutheran and Methodist and Unitarian congregations have rallied against similarly hateful measures in the North and West. For every scripture quote bandied about in support of homophobia, two more can be found in support of tolerance. For each pastor preaching hatred there is a cleric promoting peace.
No, it is not religion itself that stands in the way of progressivism, but rather that uniquely Southern variety of religion which emphasizes parochialism and selfishness and antipathy. This unholy mixture of hate and politicized belief is the Southern brand, and the younger generation just isn’t buying it. Such bigotry thrives on isolation and indoctrination, but in the age of new media and the Internet, parents are quickly going to find themselves unable to keep the world of progressive ideas out of their children’s heads. As of last year, 70% of those aged 18-35 claimed outright support same-sex marriage, as compared to 39% for the over-55 age crowd. By all accounts, young people in North Carolina went to the polls in droves yesterday to fight the anti-marriage referendum, but so too did seniors--hence the amendment’s passage. The next time this comes around for a vote--and let there be no doubt that it will--today’s seniors might not have their say, but tomorrow’s youth certainly will.
I know today is a sad day. I know the South’s continued bigotry is disheartening. I know the statistics sound empty after votes like yesterday’s, and that the ineluctable fact of marriage equality may not feel particularly ineluctable right now. But look: we’re younger, we’re smarter, we’re kinder, we’re cleverer, and we are going to win. Time is on our side, along with demographics and popular opinion. The South will always be the South, but America will always be America. So long as that name means anything to anyone, it means that we will find our way to equality. And North Carolina will just have to catch up.