Same-sex marriage not a basic rights matter

Dear Editor:

If we allow a White woman to marry a Black man, what will be next? Shall we allow her to marry her dog or her horse? These same arguments that Derryck Green uses here in his article would be perfectly at home in the anti-miscegenation arguments of the 1950s and earlier.

For all his degrees, Green’s arguments don’t stand up to the lightest scrutiny. Would he say that, if we changed our (anti-miscegenation) laws to benefit Black people, that’s discrimination? Green starts out by saying that there is no Constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Indeed, the Constitution does not mention marriages of any kind. Green should try to find real arguments – not mere opinions – for why the state should support traditional marriages and mixed-race marriages, and yet deny same-sex marriages. We should also be grateful that the Supreme Court unanimously overthrew Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act (in Loving v. Virginia), rejecting the sort of arguments that Green espouses here.

James Whistler