Let's start with who you can marry. When I was too young to marry, age 11 in 1960, many US states prohibited blacks and whites from marrying each other. For this and 117 other related reasons, the civil rights movement kicked into gear. In 1967 this civil rights momentum and the determination of a black woman, Mildred Jeter, and a white man, T. Loving, to love each other and be married brought a case to the US Supreme Court. The couple lived in Virginia, where the state would not marry them because they weren't of the same race. This next is from Wikipedia, Feb 2016, plus my comments: A law with the fine name of The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 aimed to prevent that awful degraded black blood from getting into our pure white babies. The Lovings were already mixing body fluids among the races and making babies. They went to the District and got married. Then they came back to Virginia and got arrested and sentenced to a year in jail for having the audacity to, as the phrase goes, "make an honest woman of " Mildred Jeter. They were charged with "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth." The House UnAmerican Activities Committee should have investigated this "peace and dignity" notion and the law based on it, but they were busy with other things.
The trial judge in the case, Leon M. Bazile, echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 18th-century interpretation of race, wrote:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.How sweet a use of God and bad geography to justify bigotry. This godly interpretation, which I was never taught though I grew up in about the same religion as Blumenbach, ignores the fact that (problem 1) Whites in Europe and Arabia are on the same continent as the yellow Chinese. I'm ignorant of a separate "Malays" race, but if they're in Malaysia, they're (geography problem two) on the same continent as the yellow race, just like the other suckers. The white Russians (problem 3) are next to China, against God's will. Afghanistan and Iran must be whites on the same continent next to Indians/Malays, who are next to yellows. Also, unfairly, the red race got two continents. What gives? This interpretation ignores that such religious renderings of race and facts treat US citizens unequally, do not give them equal protection under law. In 1959 it was very fashionable to just ignore such things straight out, in the name of protecting the good people from the tainted ones.
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On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. They did so, moving to the District of Columbia. That didn't go well, so they sued. If they had been able to make their peace with living in the Capital, we might still be stringing up white boys who looked at black girls, and vice-versa. I've noticed a couple of black girls myself. In Jamaica, where the boy-girl rules are quite different than in the US, a couple of them noticed me.
Other times where privacy rights came up are listed by the High Court in Carey v. Population Services International, 431 U.S. 678, 685 (1977). Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), and Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), dealt with privacy in childrearing and education. Prince v. Massachusetts (1944) with family relationships; Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942), with procreation; Griswold v. Connecticut, supra, and Eisenstadt v. Baird with contraception; and Roe v. Wade (1973), with abortion. The latter three cases were interpreted as construing the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to confer a fundamental individual right to decide whether or not to beget or bear a child. More on privacy rights next time.
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