Almighty God created the races
Subtitle: Christianity, interracial marriage, & American law
By: Fay Botham
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 271
ISBN-13: 9780807833186
Description: Botham argues that divergent Catholic and Protestant theologies of marriage and race, reinforced by regional differences between the West and the South, shaped the two pivotal cases that frame this volume, the 1948 California Supreme Court case of Perez v. Lippold (which successfully challenged California's antimiscegenation statutes on the grounds of religious freedom) and the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia (which declared legal bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional). Botham contends that the white southern Protestant notion that God "dispersed" the races, as opposed to the American Catholic emphasis on human unity and common origins, points to ways that religion influenced the course of litigation and illuminates the religious bases for Christian racist and antiracist movements. --from publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-261) and index.
Table of contents: title: Catholic California : the historic junction of religion, region, and law in Perez v. Lippold  (1948); title: The historical origins of American laws on interracial sex and marriage : the role of religion and region; title: Church authority or states' rights? : Protestant and Catholic theologies of marriage; title: Noah's sons and common origins in Adam and Eve : Protestant and Catholic theologies of race; title: States' rights and the southern white Protestant theology of race in antimiscegenation law and cases, 1867-1964; title: The southern lingua franca of race : Judge Leon M. Bazile and white Catholics; title: Epilogue : a postmodernist's reflections on history and knowledge.