Wake Me, I Must Be Dreaming: Interracial Couple In Louisiana Denied Marriage License

WTF? What country am I living in??

NPR:

A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed-race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

"I've got black friends...I let them use my bathroom." Again I say, WTF?? Who does he think he's kidding? This is so unbelievable, so incredibly outrageous, racist, stupid, and incomprehensible, that it takes my breath away. Wasn't Loving v. Virginia more than forty years ago? Who does Bardwell think he is, to arbitrarily decide who should marry and who shouldn't? He cares about the children? Bullshit!

The NAACP agrees:

"He's an elected public official and one of his duties is to marry people. He doesn't have the right to say he doesn't believe in it," Patricia Morris, president of the NAACP branch of Tangipahoa Parish, located near the Mississippi line, said Thursday.

"If he doesn't do what his position calls for him to do, he should resign from that position."

This is amazing. I myself am in an interracial relationship, and if some judge ever told us that, I'd sue the hind legs off of him (assuming I'd be able to restrain myself from kicking his ass in the first place)! Who are these people who think that they have to right to tell others they can't marry? It's a basic human right for all humans, regardless of race, age, creed, or sexual orientation.

Dammit, what's happening to this country? Despite some wishful thinking by far-right pundits and what's shown on cable news, the right is NOT ascendant nor in the majority in this country. We had an election a year ago, and the majority of Americans voted for progressive, competent government. Yet we get 24/7 coverage whenever 6 wingnuts assemble with their "Obama=Hitler!" nonsense, hatemongers like Beck and Limbaugh walk safely among us, and racist demagogues like this judge think that they can defy basic morality and the settled law of the land.

I'm pissed. More later.