The Rutgers Center for Gender, Sexuality, Law and Policy Welcomes Linda McClain, Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, 2016-2017 & Professor of Law, and Paul M. Siskind Research Scholar, Boston University to discuss "Am I a Bigot?": Debating Mixed Marriage in the 1950s and 1960s as a Problem or Sign of Progress.
This lecture highlights how the rhetoric of bigotry, prejudice, and conscience featured in objections, in the 1950s and 1960s, to “mixed” marriages: those crossing racial, ethnic, and religious lines. Drawing on a variety of historical sources, it retrieves and compares narratives about why such marriages were increasing and how to interpret and respond to such trends. A common narrative was that as young people had more social contact across lines of religion, race, nationality, and class, they increasingly crossed such lines to marry. Parents, religious leaders, and social scientists who objected to intermarriage distinguished the role of bigotry, prejudice, and an intolerance inconsistent with “the American creed” from the role of conscience, theology, and sociological concerns (such as the higher risk of separation and divorce than in homogamous marriages). Commentators debated whether intermarriage was a hopeful step toward a more tolerant, universalist society in which differences like race and religion no longer mattered or whether it threatened cultural pluralism and group survival.
Looking back to objections to mixed marriage is instructive for present-day controversies over religious objections to same-sex couples marrying because such marriages cross the line of “sex” or “gender” difference and over whether religiously-motivated objections to antidiscrimination laws that protect LGBT persons are similar to or different from religiously-motivated objections to interracial marriage. This lecture is drawn from a chapter in a book-in-progress, Bigotry, Conscience, and Marriage: Past and Present Controversies.
When: April 18, 2019 12:15-1:15
Where: Rutgers Law School Room 125, Newark, NJ 07102