I didn’t get into the “equating themselves with God” aspect but one justification against interracial marriage was that it could happen again. And sure it’s a justification for racism.
My mom is a Baptist. But she is kind and loving and forgiving and non-judgemental. Ya know, the way Jesus said Christians should be? I heard the interpretation above from her when I was young. Now, many years ago my brother was dating an Asian girl. And one day my dad said to be that he didn’t know if Mom would want an Asian grandchild. Some years after that my other brother married a woman from Japan. Eventually she had a child and a couple of years later another, and Mom has loved those children as much as any grandmother could ever love a grandchild. She had changed her mind and her beliefs (this happened before my brother and his wife started dating, I’m not sure what lead to that) . I don’t know of many of these so-called Christians out there who ever change their mind about anything. Like my uncle, who disowned his daughter when she married a black man. Refused to speak to her or have anything to do with his granddaughter.
Maybe the people in the OP have learned something about what they believe. I guess they have in this instance, but for other things, I doubt it.
In the “All in the Family” episode with Sammy Davis, Archie explained that he didn’t have a problem with integration, but clearly God did: he put white people in Europe, and black people in Africa.
To which Davis replied, “Well, he must’ve told you where we were, because someone came and got us.”
Reminds me of a joke about an old preacher. Someone asked him if sex standing up was wrong. He thought about it for a minute and said, “Yes, because it could lead to dancing.”
Not that this is true of your family, but this is not an unfamiliar sexist/racist pattern across the South. In Texas, it was historically ok for white men to marry Mexican women. Maybe some people wouldn’t approve, but it was generally acceptable. But it was NOT ok for white women to marry Mexican men. Definitely some ‘protecting the purity of our women’ stuff playing in some people’s heads.
I don’t have a lot of evidence, but I’d be willing to put down some money that there are a non-negligible number of people who would be perfectly fine with white men marrying Asian or black women but simultaneously not ok with white women marrying Asian or black men.
Let’s give the venue a little credit. They said they don’t support interracial marriages based on the Bible. But when somebody explained to them that the Bible doesn’t forbid this, they actually listened and changed their belief. Too many people would have just ignored the evidence and stuck with the belief.
What the Bible does have to warn about marriage between people of different backgrounds or origins, is when you bother to look at it about marriages between believers and heathens. Thus the stories about the pagan wives of Israelite kings bringing their false gods with them. Or the Pauline advice against “unevenly yoked” marriages where one is a believer and the other isn’t.
But interethnic couplings are portrayed as OK as long as you do not adopt the pagan ways (Joseph; Ruth; Esther; the dark-skinned beloved in the Song of Songs)
I’ve personally heard regarding a white man marrying a Black women, “Well, that’s better than a Black man marrying a white woman”. And this was in Georgia, less than ten years ago. Somehow (see the story linked in the OP) I don’t think it’s changed all that much.
Huh? And just so’s you know, I’m Mormon, white, American, grew up in the South, and my wife is Mormon and Korean, both ethnically (technically, she’s ethinically 25% Japanese and 75% Korean) and by citizenship. We got married in the Laie Temple on Oahu.
I expected it to have been the part where the sons of Noah find him drunk, dancing naked, and the youngest one laughs at him; when his father sobers up he curses the boy “your children will serve your brothers’ children”. The “three races of men” were supposed to come from each of the three sons and slavery of black people was justified claiming that they were the descendants of that third son (additional races were, uh, because; after all we’re talking about the kind of people who see dinosaur bones and claim they’re decoration).
But I’m happy to admit that the particular bit of miscegenation idiocy this thread is about is not one I had run into before.
A lot of denominations don’t do gay weddings, sadly*. That’s a very common thing. (The Catholic church, for one.) But mixed race? That’s how you know it’s a really fringe church.