I had trouble believing my eyes when I saw this, via Associated Press:
NEW ORLEANS – A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.
"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."
Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.
The A.C.L.U. has now intervened:
"It is really astonishing and disappointing to see this come up in 2009," said American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana attorney Katie Schwartzmann. She said the Supreme Courtruled in 1967 "that the government cannot tell people who they can and cannot marry."
The ACLU sent a letter to the Louisiana Judiciary Committee, which oversees the state justices of the peace, asking them to investigate Bardwell and recommending "the most severe sanctions available, because such blatant bigotry poses a substantial threat of serious harm to theadministration of justice.
"He knew he was breaking the law, but continued to do it," Schwartzmann said.
- Garry J. Wise, Toronto
Visit our Toronto Law Firm website: www.wiselaw.net
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1 comment:
Individual nutjobs can always be found on just about any given subject. A lunatic like this should never have been given a moments notice, other than utter ridicule and a complete stripping of their authority.
What is more disturbing, is that the AP is again stoking up racial hatred and prejudice in an effort to show that the US (and particularly it's republican/conservative population) is still in 1950's mode, at least in regards to race relations. By reporting isolated stories such as this, they continue the myth that such grotesque attitudes are still (in their minds) fairly common.
They are not - plain and simple.
Democrats (and noted liberal mouthpieces like barking-mad Jeanine Garagolo)love saying that any anti-Obama sentiment is (to quote barking-mad conservative Michelle Malkin) RAAAAAAAAAACIST.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28399.html
The liberal AP doesn't want you to know that though... they want to keep pounding the drum... and creating the illusion that the US is NOT post-racial, and won't be any time soon.
There's too many people still making money off that myth.
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