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| Peter Sprigg |
Loving Day is an annual celebration held on June 12 and it commemorates the day the Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial marriage via the
Loving vs. Virginia ruling.
The lgbt community has taken this day and the
Loving vs. Virginia ruling to heart because it gives us hope that anti-marriage equality laws will be defeated in the same manner.
However, leave it to the Family Research Council, and one of its spokespeople, Peter Sprigg, to attempt to claim that laws against interracial marriage and laws against marriage equality are different.
And Sprigg's attempt at doing so should leave you scratching your head or laughing your proverbial butt off.
In a column,
What Loving Means, Sprigg goes through the history of
Loving Vs. Virginia and then compares that to what he seems to think marriage equality entails. It's a boring, legalese-filled piece until this hilarious sequence of paragraphs (bold emphasis added by me):
The clear purpose of the bans on interracial marriage was to build
walls between two groups of people in society, blacks and whites. Such
laws were designed to reinforce a system of racial segregation, keeping
the races apart from one another.
In contrast, defining marriage as the union of male and female has
exactly the opposite intent and effect. Rather than building walls
between two classes of people, it creates a bridge across the most
fundamental gap in humanity -- the gap between male and female. Bridging
the divide of the sexes by uniting men and women in marriage is common
to all human civilizations, and serves the good of society.
Interracial marriage does not change the definition of marriage, and
laws against interracial marriage had as their only purpose preserving a
social system of racial segregation.
Homosexual "marriage," on the other hand, changes the fundamental
definition of the institution, and would form at least three segregated
forms of marriage: male-only unions, female-only unions, and
opposite-sex unions.
In addition to me saying "that don't make a lick of sense," allow me to go into short detail as to why. In his first statement, Sprigg is accurate. Bans on interracial marriage were to enforce a system of segregation. But that's the only thing Sprigg gets correct.
The problem lies with his sleight of hand. Defining marriage solely between man and a woman does have the same effect as banning interracial marriage, particularly because gay couples do exist and these couples have children. Keeping the rights and privileges of marriage away from them and their children does in fact reinforce a system of inequality designed by animus to tell gays that they are second class citizens. Neither Sprigg nor anyone else on his side of the argument has been able to prove that such animus does not exist
Furthermore, there is the simple fact that allowing gays to marry does not prevent the "uniting of men and women together." At no time does allowing gays to marry prevent heterosexuals from marrying each other.
Which of course means that Sprigg's claim that marriage equality would create "three segregated forms of marriage" is just plain stupid. More than that, Sprigg comes across as a high school student spinning odd theories in order to fulfill a quota of words in a class writing assignment.
If that were the case and I was Sprigg's high school teacher, I would give him an "F" for that paragraph alone.
Hopefully the Supreme Court will be as strict of a teacher to Sprigg and all of those on his side of the marriage equality spectrum who would try to pass his hokum as any degree of truth.
