Amy Goodman
@DemocracyNow·3.2M subscribers·19.4K videos
From Interracial to Same-Sex Marriage: One Family's Multigenerational Struggle
Posted
March 27, 2013
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March 27, 2013
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2:05Now PlayingWatch the full interview with Stuart Gaffney, and his husband John Lewis, at Stuart Gaffney of Marriage Equality USA reflects on his decadeslong campaign to legalize samesex marriage in the context of the struggle his parents went through to marry as an interracial couple in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: John, I want to ask your husband, Stuart Gaffney, a question about history, since we were just listening to this discussion of Justice Scalia asking Ted Olson—who, by the way, was the solicitor general under George W. Bush—when it became unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage, about your own interesting family history, Stuart, when it comes to issues of marriage and the law.
STUART GAFFNEY: Yeah, I was moved by Theodore Olson's response there in talking about the rights of interracial couples, because—thinking of another married couple. That's my own mom and dad, who were an interracial couple facing barriers just like John and I face today. My mom is Chinese American; my dad is English and Irish American. They were only able to marry legally in California because our state Supreme Court led the way in overturning a law banning interracial marriage as unconstitutional. But after they married, they moved around the country, and our family had different legal status in every state they lived in. They moved to Missouri and were told that they had an illegal marriage. And that is something that I never wanted to have in common with them. But unfortunately, same-sex couples now face that same patchwork—legal in some states, illegal in others, and unrecognized federally. My parents were only legal in all 50 states when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia that all remaining state bans for interracial couples were unconstitutional. And they fulfilled the promise that's written on the front of the U.S. Supreme Court: equal justice under law. Our family is now waiting for that promise to be fulfilled for the next generation. And for my mom and dad, they want nothing more than for me and John to be able to be legally married in all 50 states, just as they were.
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