The first Gallup poll conducted on the issue of interracial marriage was in 1958 and showed that 94% of whites opposed such unions - and while disapproval has lessened in recent decades, it's hardly been a 180-degree shift.

Do they still poll people about their opinions on interracial marriage? I'm guessing not, but I'd be interested to know what percentage of those people "troubled" by same-sex marriage are (or at least used to be, say, in the last 20 years) "troubled" by different-race marriage. In any case, the point should be clear: it has always been a band of hateful Bible-thumping cretins who need another class of people to kill instead of themselves, and a whole lot more well-meaning but ignorant people swallowing their poison.

If the Dem candidate doesn't support full, across-the-board same-sex marriage rights (at least after the election is over), he is shameful to the extent of being unsupportable. Santorum's "man on dog" quip is very instructive: disallowing marriage rights is basically saying that some people are animals. True, there are some laws protecting animals, but in general they can be beaten, starved, or killed (or neutered) at the pleasure of their owners. I really think it's that simple.

More fun from the good old days:

In the years after the Civil War, it was an eagerness to "preserve the integrity of the white race" by preventing the birth of mixed-race children that in great part motivated states to pass miscegenation laws. Some states, like California, chose to specifically prohibit "intermarriage of white persons with Chinese, Negroes, mulattos, or persons of mixed blood descended from a Chinaman or Negro from the third generation inclusive." In 1869, a Georgia judge blocked the marriage of a white Frenchman and a black woman by saying, "The amalgamation of the races is not only unnatural but is always productive of deplorable results. Our daily observations show us that the offspring of these unnatural connections are generally sick and effeminate." And a Missouri judge in 1883 prevented an intermarriage, because, "It is stated as a well authenticated fact that if the [children] of a black man and white woman, and a white man and a black woman intermarry, they cannot possibly have any progeny, and such a fact sufficiently justifies those laws which forbid the intermarriage of blacks and whites."

In contrast to the ignorance that muddied such racist rulings, the clearer prejudice of Virginia's Judge Leon Bazile in the famous 1959 Loving case (in which a black man and white woman were sentenced to prison for trying to circumvent Virginia law by marrying in Washington DC) is almost refreshing. "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Maylay and red, and he placed them on separate continents," he said. "And but for the interference with His arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriages." The 1967 federal law superceded state statutes, but it took decades for all states to officially remove these laws from their books; Alabama did so just this year.