Mir Media Group Blog

The United States has had a history of marriage restriction laws. Many states enacted miscegenation laws which were first introduced in the late seventeenth century in the slave-holding colonies of Virginia (1691) and Maryland (1692) and lasted until 1967. Many of these states restricted several minorities from marrying whites. For example, Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma banned Blacks in particular. States such as Mississippi and Missouri banned Blacks and Asians. States such as North Carolina and South Carolina banned Blacks and Native Americans, and some states such as Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia banned all non-whites. Current federal law specifies marriage to be a union of one man and one woman. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) allows states to ignore same-sex unions from other states and bars the federal government from granting marriage benefits to couples in such unions. Opposition to the recognition of Deseret as a State by the Federal government was founded on opposition to the once-practised Polygamous marriages of Mormons.