Nicholas D. Kristof does it again:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/03/opinion/03KRIS.html?th
"Long before President Bush's call for a 'constitutional amendment protecting marriage,' Representative Seaborn Roddenberry of Georgia proposed an amendment that he said would uphold the sanctity of marriage.
"Mr. Roddenberry's proposed amendment, in December 1912, stated, 'Intermarriage between Negroes or persons of color and Caucasians . . . is forever prohibited.' He took this action, he said, because some states were permitting marriages that were 'abhorrent and repugnant,' and he aimed to 'exterminate now this debasing, ultrademoralizing, un-American and inhuman leprosy.' "
" 'Let this condition go on if you will,' Mr. Roddenberry warned. 'At some day, perhaps remote, it will be a question always whether or not the solemnizing of matrimony in the North is between two descendants of our Anglo-Saxon fathers and mothers or whether it be of a mixed blood descended from the orangutan-trodden shores of far-off Africa.' (His zoology was off: orangutans come from Asia, not Africa.)
I think it was N. Kristof who wroite an article some months back lampooning/ calling for a ban on DIVORCE in order to preserve the sanctity of marriage... he always has a beautifully mordant POV.