Interracial Marriage

I know I have been pointing my intellectual guns at Answers in Genesis lately, which I assure you is only due to their recent rash of very entertaining publications to comment on.

There has been a story in the news and blogosphere recently about a Justice of the Peace in Louisiana who is said to have refused to marry an interracial couple on the grounds that “My main concern is for the children”

AiG posted a response piece to this:

Because I haven’t spoken to the persons involved, and knowing how distorted newspaper reports can be (we are only too used to massive distortions and untruths from the secular media reporting on AiG and the Creation Museum), I can’t verify if the claim in this report is true.  Nonetheless , it does give us opportunity to once again discuss the issue of so called “interracial” marriage.

Ham seems to be attempting to paint himself here as an unbiased skeptic who won’t just take anybody’s word for anything, especially groups who he considers biased. This appears to be unbiased skepticism on the surface, but is really just an intellectually lazy way of saying, “I haven’t bothered to watch videos in which the Justice of the Peace comes right on and explains why he denied the marriage license of the interracial couple right on camera”. The justice has been interviewed already by CBS and other news outlets, and he continues to admit that he refused to marry the couple. If that’s not verification, then neither would video of Jesus taken by a time traveler be verifiable evidence that Jesus existed. Ham should at least apply the same standard of skepticism to his religion.

I also don’t feel that the “secular media” has “massively distorted” reports of the creation museum.

Now ironically, I will be speaking next weekend (in Mississippi) only 4 hours from where this story eminates from—and on the Sunday evening, I will actually be speaking on the origin of so called “races,” and dealing with the topic of “interracial marriage.”

At AiG we have always taught that biologically there is only one race (Adam’s race), however, spiritually, there are two races (the saved and unsaved).  It is the two spiritual “races” that God clearly instructs in His Word not to mix in marriage.  In other words, when someone asks me “does the Bible deal with interracial marriage?”  I answer, “it sure does, it makes it clear the saved ‘race’ should never knowingly marry the unsaved ‘race’—and that’s all the Bible teaches about ‘interracial’ marriage.’”  Biologically, there is no such thing as “interracial” marriage as there is only one “race”—we are all descendants of one man, Adam.  There are different people groups, particularly because of the Tower of Babel.

So in other words, AiG is not racist, it’s just racist. So everybody is of “Adam’s Race”, but the different “groups” of people are groups that were formed at the Tower of Babel.

So let’s talk a little bit about the Tower of Babel, shall we? The basic story is like this: At one point, everyone in the world shared one language. The people of the world decided it would be a good idea to build a big tower to get to heaven, give themselves a name, and prevent everyone from being scattered. The tower was basically a monument to themselves. God came down, saw the tower and realized that his people, in unifying and trying to build this tower, would turn away from him if they succeeded.

To prevent this from happening, the Biblical god confused all of the languages of his people and scattered them all over the earth. AiG believes that descendants of Ham went to Africa during this scattering.

This is important because though an abandoned theology now, in the 18^th-20^th centuries, the curse of Ham was widely used to justify racism and slavery of black people. Ham’s descendant Canaan and all of Canaan’s descendents were cursed to be enslaved. Ham and Canaan were also cursed by god making their faces and hair dark. The Bible has been used for hundreds of years as justification for racism and slavery.

AiG claims they are not “racist”, but “spiritual racism” is not any different. Flimsy and I have spoken before about the idea of racism and how people often create a strawman “racism” in order to explain that they are not racist. In other words, someone might say, “I’m not racist, I don’t judge people based on the color of their skin”. People aren’t racist because of color. People are racist because they think one race is different from the next, and they use color to delineate which race you belong to. Being racist means saying, “I don’t hate black people, I just hate their culture”. It does not mean, “I hate black people because their skin is black”. In the first sentence, a person might claim they are not racist.

I would say that unfairly judging people based on their spirituality is bigoted and not racist, but if AiG wants to call a person’s religious beliefs a “spiritual race” then AiG is racist in the same way they are bigoted for being against equal rights for homosexuals. . Call it spiritually racist, put “race” in quotes, or call it by some other name – AiG’s “spiritual racism” is Coca-Cola and typical racism is Pepsi-cola. They’re both colas.