Bans on Interracial Unions Offer Perspective on Gay Ones

A. Liptak

Without a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages, President Bush warned on Feb. 24, there is a grave risk that "every state would be forced to recognize any relationship that judges in Boston or officials in San Francisco choose to call a marriage."The president invoked the Constitution's "full faith and credit" clause, which requires states to honor court judgments from other states, as the basis for his alarm.But legal scholars say that an examination of the last wrenching national debate over the definition of marriage _ when, only 50 years ago, a majority of states banned interracial marriages _ demonstrates that the president misunderstood the legal terrain."No state has ever been required by the full faith and credit clause to recognize any marriage they didn't want to," said Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University and the author of "The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law."Indeed, until the Supreme Court struck down all laws banning interracial marriage in 1967, the nation lived with a patchwork of laws on the question. Those states that found interracial marriages offensive to their public policies were not required to recognize such marriages performed elsewhere, though sometimes they did, but as a matter of choice rather than constitutional compulsion. That experience is instructive, legal scholars say, about what is likely to happen when Massachusetts starts performing gay marriages in May.