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Gay Marriage Through a Black-White Prism

Source: NYT (10-29-06)

N 1947, the county clerk in Los Angeles refused to marry Andrea Perez and Sylvester Davis. They were of different races, and a California law said that “all marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race or mulattoes are illegal.” The next year, the California Supreme Court, by a vote of 4 to 3, struck down that law in Perez v. Sharp.

In 2003, in another 4-to-3 decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court authorized gay marriages, and it invoked the Perez case as a model.

Last week, in a third 4-to-3 decision, the New Jersey Supreme Court stopped just short of endorsing gay marriages. It instructed the State Legislature to provide gay unions with a full complement of legal rights but said that the question of whether to call such unions “marriages” was a political, not judicial, one.

The New Jersey court did not mention the Perez case by name and it said that interracial marriage was not a useful touchstone in thinking about same-sex marriage.

Posted on Sunday, October 29, 2006 at 3:23 PM | Comments (1) | Return

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