Opinion:    "Gay marriage is totally different from interracial marriage. Bans on interracial marriage were about keeping two races apart so that one race could oppress the other.

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Fact:  Bans on inter-religious marriage were about keeping two religions apart so that one religion could oppress the other.” All arbitrary bans of this nature are the same: one group discriminating against another because of immutable human characteristics.

Oppression comes in many forms, and is usually the result of majority power over the minority - for arbitrary, discriminatory reasons, without a compelling public rationale. If the myth is rephrased this way, "Justifications for the ban on gay marriage are like justifications for the ban on interracial marriages", then the parallels are numerous enough to lead to equivalency. A reading of the historic justifications for anti-miscegenation laws, leading up to the landmark Supreme Court decision striking them down, reveals an almost verbatim guide to the current justifications against marriage equality. "Society will crumble. Children will be taught that it is normal."

Case law and social science are showing us that the bans on gay marriage are exactly the same as the bans on interracial marriage because the justifications for both are, so far, arbitrary, unscientific, and based on fears which fail to materialize. Consequently, the same destructions to society have not come from gay marriage as they have not come from interracial marriage. The social impacts of one's race may differ in detail from the social impacts of one's sexual orientation, but the current discussion isn't about which kind of oppression is worse. It's about the idea of oppression, in general.

We all remember the civil servant in Louisiana who, in 2009, announced simultaneously that he was not a racist, and that he would not issue a marriage license to an interracial couple because he was concerned for the children who might be born of the relationship and that, in his experience, most interracial marriages didn't last. We don’t know what primarily drove his decision (racism, oppression, discrimination), but we do know that it was arbitrary and unscientific.

Although an alarming 40 percent of Alabama's residents voted twelve years ago to keep a ban on interracial marriage, the state did ultimately remove the policy from its constitution. What does that tell us? It reminds us that large percentages of the population do vote based on irrational fears, and that the irrational fears of a voter should not, in Constitutional America, trump the rational rights of the feared.

Mildred Loving, gentle, reluctant face of our country's last cathartic marriage debate, said in 2007, "I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry."