Indiana Republican Senator Mike Braun is in the news for telling the Times of Northwest Indiana that the Supreme Court was wrong for legalizing interracial marriage in 1967, and that such issues are best left to the states.
Braun was speaking broadly of his opposition to deciding civil rights issues, like abortion, at the federal level.
“So you would be okay with the Supreme Court leaving the question of interracial marriage to the states?” a reporter asked.
“Yes,” Braun replied. “I think that that’s something that if you’re not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh in on issues like that, you’re not gonna be able to have your cake and eat it too.”
Braun later attempted to walk back the comments, claiming he didn’t understand the question, which was posed to him several times in several different ways. While Braun’s walkback condemned racism broadly, he didn’t make any further reference to the 1967 Supreme Court decision and whether or not it was wrongly decided.
“Is it okay for people of different races to get married?” is one of those questions, like “Is it okay to try to overturn free and fair election results?”, that until recently had seemed like a fairly settled issue here in America. But the Republican party’s radical lurch toward authoritarianism under Donald Trump has underscored that there are plenty of people who would gladly strip away certain freedoms that we’ve long taken for granted.
Take interracial marriage, for instance. Since the 1990s, the General Social Survey has been asking people how they’d feel if one of their close family members married someone of a different race. It’s a pretty clever question: rather than asking whether interracial marriage should be outlawed, or whether people support it in general, the survey simply asks people how they’d feel about a hypothetical situation. This somewhat neutralizes what pollsters call social desirability bias — respondents’ hesitancy to voice fringe or undesirable opinions that may draw criticism from others.
In 2021, according to the survey, about 7 percent of American adults said they’d be “opposed” or “strongly opposed” to a close family member marrying a black person. While that’s down considerably from the nearly 60 percent who said that in 1990, it still means there are about 20 million people in this country who oppose interracial marriage.
Those people, as it turns out, are disproportionately Republicans like Mike Braun.
About 5 percent of Democrats and Independents, for instance, are opposed to interracial marriage. But about 13 percent of Republicans are opposed, with the strongest Republican partisans showing the greatest level of opposition.
The survey also asks how people feel about relatives marrying members of different racial groups too, including whites, Asians and Hispanics. There’s a pretty striking partisan divergence here as well. Democrats disapprove of interracial marriages with all four groups at roughly similar levels. But there’s kind of a racial disapproval gradient among Republicans: whites are the most favored racial category, followed by Hispanics and Asians, with blacks eliciting the most opposition.
Narrowing the sample down to just white respondents doesn’t change these numbers significantly for either party, just a point or two in one direction or the other, which is well within the margin of error. This may be because the Republican party is overwhelmingly white (91 percent, according to the GSS) to begin with, while racial attitudes among white and non-white Democrats are similar.
This is all kind of bleak but it’s worth noting that the people uncomfortable with interracial marriage, regardless of party, are a minority that’s shrinking fast. In 1990, for instance, more than two-thirds of Republicans were opposed to a family member marrying a black person. For that number to dwindle down to 13 percent in a few decades represents remarkable progress.
Still, 20 million people is a lot of people. The GSS numbers underscore how talk of “letting the states decide interracial marriage” isn’t necessarily a fringe position. More than 1 in 8 Republicans (and, to be fair, 1 in 20 Democrats) are racist enough to tell a stranger they’d be unhappy if a relative married a black person. If popular figures like Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson started ranting about the topic the way they currently do about things like “voter fraud” or immigrant caravans, you’d probably see that number go a lot higher.
Braun doesn’t speak for or represent me but alas, I’m a tiny blue dot in an ocean of red here in IN.