Nicholas D. Kristof: A past try for a marriage amendment

[question everything]

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Long before President Bush's call for a "constitutional amendment protecting marriage," Rep. Seaborn Roddenberry of Georgia proposed an amendment that he said would uphold the sanctity of marriage.

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," 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.)

In Bush's call for action last week, he argued that the drastic step of a constitutional amendment is necessary because "marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society." Roddenberry also worried about the risks ahead: "This slavery of white women to black beasts will bring this nation to a conflict as fatal and as bloody as ever reddened the soil of Virginia."

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Social conservatives like Bush are right in saying that marriage is "the most fundamental institution in civilization." So we should extend it to America's gay minority – just as marriage was earlier extended from Europe's aristocrats to the masses.

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If we're serious about constitutional remedies for marital breakdowns, we could adopt an amendment criminalizing adultery. Zamfara, a state in northern Nigeria, has had success in reducing AIDS, prostitution and extramarital affairs by sentencing adulterers to be stoned to death.

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Kristof can be reached via e-mail at [e-mail].

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