Adding Fuel to the Fire

[khaosworks]

To those who don't understand why I find the position of people who support the word "civil unions" for same-sex couples almost as intolerable as those who say that marriage for the same should be banned, or for those who require some clarification or understanding to why the naming is important even if the benefits are the same.

Here's three words.

Plessy v. Ferguson.

Doesn't right a bell? Three more words.

Separate but equal.

We like to think we've grown somewhat beyond that since 1955.

Comments

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

The circle turns, if you wait long enough. Before slavery began to be associated with race in the Americas, free white and black lived together and indeed did intermarry in colonial Virginia. Even after 1661, when the court decided that the children of slaves would still be slaves - and started them on the road to equating "slave" with "black", Virginia still apparently continued to have a, shall we say, flexible stance towards interracial marriages.

There's a book titled "Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861" by Joshua D. Rothman, from Continuity Press which I've not read but looks like an interesting study (and I wouldn't mind being bought for a starving grad student, hint hint).

The fact that he extends the study up to the beginnings of the Civil War is interesting, because I'd always beleived that the end of the line, really, for racial tolerance was the Stono Rebellion in 1739 and the passing of the Negro Act which essentially removed all civil rights from all African-Americans.