Love is Blind

Love is blind.
You can fall in love in just 5 seconds.

You love who you love. 

Its hard to imagine that an industrialized nation such as the United States would have had antimiscegenation laws on its books as recently as the 1960's.   "The Crime of Interracial Marriage" was published in the journal America in 1967.  The article notes that at the time, 18 states still had antimiscegenation laws on the books that treated interracial marriage as a crime.  The laws were not overturned until the landmark ruling in the Supreme Court Loving v Virginia case in 1967.

What's interesting about the Loving case is the support it had in the religious community. Religious leaders were very vocal in their opposition of antimiscegenation laws.  Stanley Kramer's 1967 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner offers an interesting view of the issue of interracial marriage. The most sympathetic character in the film is that of the priest, Monsignor Ryan. Even though the couple played by Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy are portrayed as progressive minded liberals, they both have problems with their daughter's announcement that she is going to be marrying a black man.  They are forced to reconcile their feelings toward racial equality in theory and their feelings toward their own daughter and the person she has chosen to marry. Hepburn and Tracy's counterparts are shown to have just as many reservations towards an interracial relationship.   It is an absolutely brilliant commentary on the human condition.