So have you heard about the tale about the Louisiana justice of the peace,  Keith Bardwell, who denied an interracial couple a marriage license out of an abundance of concern for their potential offspring?   JP Bardwell, who proclaims he is not a racist, drew the following conclusions from his (?) experience: (a) interracial marriages don’t last long and (b) the offspring are not accepted by either white or black society.   JP Bardwell just doesn’t “believe in mixing the races that way. ” 

It was only 32 years ago that Philadelphia's William Marutani, the first Nisei to appear in the United States Supreme Court, observed the absurdity of empowering clerks (or JPs, for that matter) to decide who was of a pure white race -- although most anthropologists rejected the notion of a pure “white race”--  in his arguments against anti-miscegnation laws in Loving v. Virginia.  See Loving v. Virginia: Lifting the Ban Against Interracial Marriage by Susan Dudley Gold. He also observed that those of “white ancestry” would be hard-pressed to to prove they had no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian given the invasions and “inevitable cross breeding” in Europe and the “melting pot of America.”  Id.  The Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, who have a bit more swat than any Justice of the Peace, sided with the Lovings, who had been convicted of violating the anti-miscegnation laws, in a 9-0 decision that race-based restrictions on the freedom of choice to marry were odious to a free people” and struck the laws down:

To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

The Virginia law, the Court found, had no legitimate purpose "independent of invidious racial discrimination." The Court rejected the state's argument that the statute was legitimate because it applied equally to both blacks and whites and found that racial classifications were not subject to a "rational purpose" test under the Fourteenth Amendment and were subject to the most rigid scrutiny.

The ACLU has taken this matter to the Louisiana Judiciary Committee and the couple who were denied a license have consulted the US Attorney’s office about filing a discrimination complaint.