Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (96 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
Mildred Loving issued this statement on the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in the case of
Loving v. Virginia
, the decision that made it unconstitutional for states to prohibit interracial marriages.
It surprises most people to learn that when Barack Obama was born—yes, in Hawaii in 1960—his white mother and black father could not have been married in the state of Virginia, home state of eight American presidents. Interracial marriage did not gain full constitutional protection until June 12, 1967, when the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the case of
Loving v. Virginia
, striking down all state laws prohibiting “miscegenation,” or interracial marriage, in America.
Mildred and Richard Loving brought the case. He was white and she was black and they had married legally in Washington, D.C., in June 1958. But when the couple traveled to Virginia, Richard Loving was arrested for the crime of being married to a black woman. The Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge and were sentenced to one year in jail. The trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of twenty-five years if the couple agreed to leave the state and not return for twenty-five years. At the time, the trial judge wrote in his opinion:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, that but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
The Lovings returned to Washington, D.C., but later filed a motion of appeal in the case. They lost the early rounds, but their case eventually wound its way to the Supreme Court.
On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that anti-miscegenation laws, such as those in Virginia, violated the Fifth Amendment’s “due process” clause (“No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) and the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (“No state shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”).
In declaring the unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote: “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.”
With the passage of time, fewer and fewer Americans ever heard of the Loving case, and interracial marriage no longer seemed controversial. But interest in the case was reawakened in light of the controversy that accompanied a spate of court decisions and legislation legalizing civil unions and marriages between same-sex partners. The question of same-sex unions and same-sex partners obtaining basic legal protections surged to the forefront of American society in the 1990s as some states were moving to permit some form of same-sex union. While not a major national political issue in 1996, the question was significant enough to spur Congress to pass the Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by President Clinton, in September of that year. The law essentially defined marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman and said that no state, or the federal government, needed to treat a relationship between persons of the same sex as a marriage, even if that relationship was recognized as a marriage in another state.
The controversy over “gay marriage” accelerated in 2000, when Vermont became the first state to permit civil unions, on April 26. In 2004, the issue came to greater prominence during the presidential race between George Bush and his Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. It had been elevated to the national stage in 2003, when the Massachusetts supreme judicial court extended the right to marry to same-sex couples, a decision that took effect in May 2004. Although Bush and Kerry agreed in defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, conservatives used the issue to assault “liberal” judges who were “legislating from the bench.”
By 2008, the controversy had grown as a court in California, the nation’s most populous state, also issued a decision that effectively legalized same-sex marriage there. A rush of same-sex marriages occurred in California at the same time that a constitutional amendment known as Proposition 8 was put on the ballot. The initiative was designed to restore the definition of marriage as opposite-sex only. On Election Day 2008, Proposition 8 passed, but at the same time, the courts recognized the 18,000 same-sex marriages that had already taken place in the state, creating two classes of “marriage.”
Since 2008, same-sex marriage has also become legal in Connecticut by legislation (2008), in Iowa by court decision (2009), in Vermont by legislation (2009), and in New Hampshire by legislation (2010). Maine briefly legalized same-sex marriage, only to have it defeated in a public referendum in November 2009. In addition, New Jersey created a same-sex legal union, and at least ten other states offer some form of legal unions providing some of the rights of legal marriage to same-sex and otherwise unmarried couples. In March 2010, Washington, D.C., legalized same-sex marriages by an act of the city council.
Under the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government does not recognize these marriages or unions. This is significant in regard to federally guaranteed benefits extended to spouses, such as disability or Social Security. However, some states that do not offer same-sex marriage do recognize these out-of-state marriages, leading to a crazy quilt of differing protections. All this means the question of “equal protection under the law,” the constitutional guarantee affirmed in
Loving v. Virginia
, may ultimately leave this issue in the hands of the United States Supreme Court.
On August 4, 2010, a federal judge ruled that California’s Proposition 8, which overturned the state’s same-sex marriage law, was unconstitutional. In his decision, Judge Vaughn R. Walker said that the ban discriminated against gay men and women. “Excluding same-sex couples from marriage is simply not rationally related to a legitimate state interest,” Judge Walker wrote.
The argument for overturning Proposition 8 was based in part on the precedent of the Loving case. More surprisingly, a team that included the attorneys David Boies and Ted Olson argued the suit for the plaintiffs. (The state of California did not participate in the case.) These two men were best known as the opposing lawyers in
Bush v. Gore
, the arguments over the election of 2000 that culminated in the historic Supreme Court decision that made George Bush president. Boies had represented Vice President Al Gore, and Olson had represented George W. Bush and then, following Bush’s victory, served as solicitor general under him.
A staunch conservative Republican whose wife—the attorney and Fox News commentator Barbara Olson—had died aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, Ted Olson once said, “Creating a second class of citizens is discrimination, plain and simple.” He also told the
New York Times
that “his support of same-sex marriage stemmed from longstanding personal and legal conviction. He sees nothing inconsistent with that stance and his devotion to conservative legal causes: the same antipathy toward ‘government discrimination.’ ”
The decision in the California case seemed destined for the Supreme Court.
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PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
, commenting on the relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, led by the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Michael Brown, Mobile, Alabama, September 2, 2005:
Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job. The FEMA Director’s working 24 hours a day.
The most costly storm in American history made its first landfall in southeast Florida on August 25, 2005, as a Category 1 hurricane. After weakening slightly, Katrina moved over the Gulf of Mexico and began to strengthen over the Gulf’s warm, shallow waters, eventually being upgraded to a Category 5 hurricane on August 28. That day, Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city. Thousands of residents either chose to stay or were unable to leave because of inadequate preparations for transporting so many people. Responding to a request for 700 buses by the Louisiana National Guard, FEMA sent 100. More than 30,000 people took refuge in the city’s football stadium, the Superdome. They had roughly thirty-six hours’ worth of food.
Katrina was at Category 3 strength when it made landfall again on Monday, August 29, in Louisiana. Despite weakening, Katrina caused massive storm surges, measuring up to twenty-five to twenty-eight feet, throughout southeast Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Combined with strong winds and heavy rainfall, the storm surges contributed to the failure of the New Orleans levee system on August 30. The levees, a system of canals that ringed New Orleans, a city that mostly lies below sea level, were topped, as predicted by two federal agencies—the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center—and entire neighborhoods were inundated. This scenario had actually been forecast by a FEMA exercise thirteen months before Katrina struck, according to MSNBC.
By Wednesday, August 31, New Orleans had fallen into chaos and thousands of residents, mostly poor and African American, were trapped in the Superdome, where people were dying. Lacking sufficient supplies and sanitary facilities, the evacuation center at the Superdome soon became a hellish scene of crime and horror. When asked where FEMA’s director, Mike Brown, was as the situation unraveled, his secretary told reporters that Brown was pressed for time, since they were caught in traffic and Brown had a lunchtime restaurant reservation he did not want to miss.
While many communities along the Gulf Coast were severely damaged by the storm, New Orleans was the center of the calamity. About 80 percent of the city was eventually flooded, displacing more than 1 million people from their homes. An exact death count was never established, but the fatalities from Katrina were estimated at more than 1,833, with property damage in excess of $125 billion.
The reaction of the government to the Katrina disaster was considered grossly disorganized and inefficient, at every level from Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, and Louisiana’s first female governor, Kathleen Blanco, to the entire federal response. But President Bush and the performance of FEMA and its director Michael Brown in particular came in for the most criticism. President Bush was criticized for failing to take the situation seriously and then for making what was considered only a cursory flyover of the area a few days after the hurricane struck. Then after claiming that nobody had predicted the failure of the levees, the president was contradicted by videotapes, which showed him being given specific warnings of the impending disaster at a briefing before Katrina made its devastating landfall. Michael Brown, however, paid the price. He was recalled to Washington and resigned ten days after the infamous press conference in which the president had praised him.
One year after the Katrina disaster, Brown stated on MSNBC that at the insistence of the White House, he had lied about what had happened. “The lie was that we were working as a team and that everything was working smoothly. And how we would go out, and I beat myself up daily for allowing this to have happened, to sit there and go on television and talk about how things are working well, when you know they are not behind the scenes, is just wrong. . . . That’s exactly why I think that’s the biggest mistake that I made, was not leveling with the American people, and saying, you know what, this is a catastrophic event, and it’s not working at the state, local, or the federal level.”
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HENRY PAULSON
, then Secretary of the Treasury in the Bush administration, in
On the Brink
:
It was Thursday morning, September 4, 2008, and we were in the Oval Office of the White House discussing the fate of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the troubled housing finance giants. For the good of the country, I had proposed that we seize control of the companies, fire their bosses, and prepare to provide up to $100 billion of capital support for each. If we did not act immediately, Fannie and Freddie would, I feared, take down the financial system, and the global economy, with them.
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Excerpt from an exchange between Representative
HENRY WAXMAN
(Democrat, California) and the former chairman of the Federal Reserve,
ALAN GREENSPAN
, during congressional testimony over the collapse of the financial system, October 2008:
Rep. Henry Waxman
: You found a flaw in the reality . . .
Alan Greenspan
: Flaw in the model that I perceived in the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.
Rep. Henry Waxman
: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?
Alan Greenspan
: That is—precisely. No, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.
How do you keep a “bubble” from bursting?
The catastrophic flooding of New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina gave the word “underwater” a deadly realism and terrifying finality. Images of people clinging to rooftops as floodwaters surged around them made certain of that. But the word “underwater” acquired a whole new meaning to Americans when a financial perfect storm threatened to inundate the American economy, and with it the rest of the world’s financial systems.
