MARRIAGE AND PROCREATION: John Howard replies to Maggie Gallagher and Andrew Sullivan

[Of course this is true even more explicitly of other cases predicated on a fundamental right to marry, such as Zablocki v. Redhail. --Maggie.]

Loving v. Virginia could never have been decided the way it was if marriage was seperate from procreation.

The famous phrase "basic civil right" in Loving is a citation from Skinner v Oklahoma and refers explicitly to procreation, not marriage. Marriage is only a "basic civil right" because that's how we allow people to exercize their procreation rights.

So, the Court could never have found that marriage was a "basic civil right" if procreation was legal without mariage, because denying them marriage wouldn't have had anythig to do with denying them their basic civil rights. Anti-miscegenation laws prevented the genes from mixing by not allowing marriage, aka sexual intercourse. They prevented procreation with the person of your choice, not hospital visits or passing on property, etc, all of which were legal for people without marriage.

posted by Eve at 1:39 AM | link

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