Ponder the rather distressing fact that Mark Steyn is smarter than a one-time Solicitor General of the United States of America:
MS: Well, I must say I’m astonished. Ted Olson is a smart guy, and I’m astonished by the weakness of the arguments. I mean, I don’t, just to be fair ahead of all that, I think there is something absurd and ridiculous in an appellate court defining an institution that predates the United States by a couple of millennia. I think that’s taking judicial supremacism to an absolute point of absurdity.
But given that, I’m not a big fan of Justice Kennedy, but I thought he made an incredibly obvious point when, like everybody else, Ted Olson said well, you know, once upon a time, we banned interracial marriage, so this is exactly the same as Loving V. Virginia, the 1967 case that struck down interracial marriage. A
And you know, Justice Kennedy said you know, what are you on about? He said in that case, the interracial marriage is basically an invention of 19th Century America that was at odds with existing common law marriage as it had been for hundreds of years.
HH: You mean the ban? You mean the ban, the ban on interracial marriage, yeah.
MS: Yeah, the ban. Yeah, so the ban on interracial marriage was the innovation, and a disgusting, localized innovation in Virginia and other American states at odds with every common law jurisdiction in the British West Indies, for example, or in India.
In India, one out of every, during the Raj, one out of every three British men is estimated to have married an Indian woman out there.
So in other words, in other common law traditions, there was hundreds of years of experience with interracial marriage. It’s a completely irrelevant, it’s an entirely irrelevant comparison, and I’m astonished by the laziness of Ted Olson and others who rely on that Loving V. Virginia case.
