Earlier today, my wife and I sent the following letter to our state representative:
Representative Rachel Kaprielian
Room 479
State House
Boston, MA 02133
Dear Rachel,
During last month's Democratic Convention, several people asked Steve to sign his name to a post card asking you to support marriage equality and vote against the marriage ban at the upcoming Constitutional Convention. We figured that we know you well enough to be uncomfortable sending you words someone else had written.
We are writing to both thank you for your previous support of marriage equality and to encourage you to continue and redouble your efforts to change the votes needed to keep the marriage ban off of the 2008 ballot. If there are not enough votes to defeat the ban, we ask you to work to stop it in any other way available to you.
This is an issue that is particularly important to us, as a couple in an interracial marriage. There was a time not too long ago when in many states it would have been illegal for the two of us to marry. Opponents of interracial marriage then made many of the same arguments that opponents of marriage equality make today. They claimed that these unions were "unnatural" and violated God’s laws, and that children in such families would have psychological problems. Then, as now, these arguments were mostly justifications for prejudice.
Massachusetts was at the forefront of the movement to allow couples like us to marry, repealing our anti-miscegenation laws in 1843, more than a century ahead of the rest of the country. Yet these laws were not repealed by popular vote, but by a group of abolitionists who pressured the legislature to do the right thing. Once again, members of the legislature should act to keep marriage protected for all couples who want it.
On June 12th, forty years will have passed since the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, guaranteed the rights of interracial couples to marry. Please do not allow Massachusetts to celebrate that anniversary by taking steps toward limiting marriage rights.
Again, thank you for your unwavering support on this issue,
[sco & Mrs. sco]
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