Magazine Cover of the Week

In 1967, marriages like this were front-page news in America. Nowadays, few Americans pay attention to them anymore save for a few reactionaries and while such marriages may not be universally popular in America, few Americans doubt their legality.

Indeed, the one such problem with such marriages is that though they were the subject of a lot of idealistic rhetoric back in the day, they were still subject to the same human flaws which create problems in intraracial marriages. Of course, intraracial marriages receive a lot of idealistic rhetoric in their favor too and no one thinks it bad that such marriages sometimes fail despite the efforts of both partners. And I suspect some of the marriages recently legalized in New York will ultimately fail for similar reasons. (Then again, I suspect some of them will succeed.)

I could argue that one can avoid the whole mess by simply not getting married in the first place but I've seen too many quarrels between couples who never got legally married to pretend that's an adequate solution. After all, it's usually not the marriage license that causes the problems. It's the two people who sign it.