To the Editor:
Is it April Fools’s Day? Was I reading The Onion? My jaw is still dropping after reading Ben Heaton’s letter in praise of anti-miscegenation laws (“not practiced by the majority of civilized people”?) and, by extension, the effort to prevent gays and lesbians from legally marrying in this country.
Pardon me for saying but I think Mr. Heaton was born too late, a century or so I would think. His devotion to Plessy v. Ferguson (by the way, Mr. Heaton, this ruling was indeed disputed and overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education decision) and to separation of the races is more in tune with 1904, not 2004. Perhaps Mr. Heaton would have us return to an earlier “traditional meaning of marriage” in which only people with property or royal interests were married or when women were considered commodities who (which?) went from being the property of her father to the property of her husband.
Just as the majority of civilized people (my definition) have come to accept interracial marriage as a basic human right, so I believe people will come to accept equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. Though I imagine that in 2104 someone will write to the Campus Times and pine for the old days when marriage was restricted to heterosexual couples, interracial couples included.
Sincerely,Bob Dardano, class of 1977robertdardano@hotmail.comw-202-707-9493
